Big Bang Theory: HofstadterHoffman Cohabitation
by Thor2000
Summary: What happens when a new character interupts the timeline of a series and rewrites the history of the characters? Leonard moves out of the apartment in this alternate timeline reality.
1. Chapter 1

The trouble had started when Leonard announced his good news.

Leonard Hofstadter was one of the theoretical physicists at the California Institute of Technology or Cal Tech as it was known to the locals. Although short in stature, he was large in personality. A moderate figure with brown eyes behind large black framed glasses, he was a likable and studious young man who enjoyed comic books and science fiction in his private pursuits, but when Professor Roland Morton injured himself in a clandestine exercise, Leonard was chosen to replace him in a team of twelve scheduled to head to visit the large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland. It was a big deal for any serious physicist or scientist, but Leonard wanted to use the trip as something else. He wanted to share the time with his girlfriend, Penny Parker. She was a struggling actress living in his apartment building and the first real love of his life. It was an easy and logical solution, but the main obstacle was Sheldon Cooper, his roommate, a fellow physicist and general nuisance.

"So, did you guys resolve who's going to Switzerland?" Howard poked the metaphorical bees' nest. He and his best friend, Rajesh Koothrapalli, were colleagues at Cal Tech, and they always ate in the Cheesecake Factory at least once a week together with Sheldon and Leonard.

"What's to resolve?" Sheldon smirked assuredly. "I'm the one who's going to Switzerland."

Leonard looked up over his glasses. Sheldon lived in his own world, and what he didn't make room for in it didn't exist in it, such as free speech and freedom to speak for one's self. He had found that out the hard way. When he had moved in with Sheldon, he had been asked to sign a roommate agreement – an incredibly biased and one-sided manifest that Sheldon had Leonard signed when he moved into the apartment, but it had more in common with Hitler's _Mein Kampf_ than any Normal cohabital agreement. What it was was actually Sheldon's totalitarian agreement to restrict and bind Leonard and his freedom in the apartment. It covered everything from the casual like driving Sheldon to the office, to the insane like controlling seating arrangements and schedules to the downright sadistic like dictating Leonard's dating routine and personal habits. It was something that was supposed to set and arrange their boundaries in the apartment, but as Leonard quickly realized, it actually allowed Sheldon to make all sorts of crazy demands on Leonard's life and reputation and force Leonard into subservience. He referred to it as to the agreement from hell. If only he had looked a bit closer, he might have noticed the clause binding Leonard to take Sheldon with him to see the Cern Super-Collider when it became possible.

"Sheldon." Leonard responded. "For hopefully the last time, I'm taking Penny."

"No, you're not…"

"Yes, I am…"

"No, you're not…" Sheldon steadfastly stuck to written and signed agreement as if he was the devil bartering for Leonard's soul.

"Yes, he is…" Penny was like the very shapely and attractive angel trying to save Leonard's soul. "Here's your lunch, guys." The struggling actress still had to eat and made her living as a waitress in the area Cheesecake Factory restaurant. Leonard got the hamburger without cheese, Raj broke his Hindu diatribe by eating hamburger as well and Howard displayed weak Jewish tradition by ignoring the kosher dishes.

"Now, Sheldon," She stood over the table in her restaurant uniform. "Are we going to have a problem?"

"Penny…" Sheldon watched as she held his hamburger hostage over his head. "This is the Cern Super-Collider in Switzerland. This is like a giant ball of yarn to your people."

"My people come from Nebraska." She narrowed her eyes at him. "And we can kick the asses of your people back to whatever planet you came from." She surrendered his hamburger to him but only to do her job.

"Sheldon, why are you making this a problem?" Leonard's insides twisted whenever Sheldon's ego contradicted his basic human rights.

"Because it's in the roommate agreement."

"We also signed a clause that whoever gets abducted by aliens has to get them to pick the other one up." He looked toward Penny, but she had other customers to take care of in the restaurant. Raj sat silently watching the fight unfold before him. "We also signed that if one of us gets a TV show on SyFy Channel that the other one gets to be co-host!" He paused to take a breath. "We can't take the roommate agreement at face value because we never set a rider in it in the event either of us got a girlfriend."

"Why not?" Raj asked.

"Quite frankly, at the time, it seemed a bit far-fetched…" Sheldon added. "Anyway, girlfriend status is arbitrary because she's not a tenant of our apartment." He reacted distant to Leonard's disgruntled emotions.

"Sheldon…" Leonard grew even more exasperated trying to turn Sheldon into a human being. "I'm taking Penny."

"No, you're not." Sheldon corrected him.

"There is no way in Hell I'm taking you with me on this trip."

"You have to…" Sheldon was adamant. "It's in the roommate agreement."

"Curse the Roommate Agreement!"

"No, sir, the Roommate Agreement curses you!"

"My, God, Leonard…" Howard rolled his eyes. "You're beating a dead crazy horse." He referred to Sheldon's insanity. They made jokes about it all the time, but at these times, it was scary when it became real. "Just buckle under…"

"No, not this time…" Leonard answered. "It's a matter of principle!"

"Dude…" Raj looked over tired of this recurring battle between Leonard's rights and Sheldon's totalitarian regime. "You know you're going to give in just to shut him up…"

Sheldon shot a harsh stare at him.

"…Just do it already." Raj added.

"Excuse me…." The guy at the next table beyond Leonard and Howard turned round toward their elaborate argument. "I'm sorry to overhear your discussion, but…"

"How could you stop overhearing it?" Sheldon remarked. "Unless you put earmuffs on, you were going to hear it. Do you mean you were unable to ignore it?"

Their would-be advisor paused in confusion over Sheldon's rather odd observation.

"Anyway…" Their guest continued after a perturbed shake of his head. "Your solution is rather simple. You have a girlfriend you want to share the trip with, right?"

"Yeah…" Leonard wanted to hear this.

"Your best friend wants to see this Hadron Collider…"

"Correct." Sheldon interrupted. "You see, Leonard. Even strangers agree that I should go with you."

Leonard rolled his eyes and turned to his left side to hear this solution.

"I'm sorry…" He apologized. "What do you think I should do?"

"You should take your girlfriend, and make your roommate pay for his own trip and lodging to see the Collider…" Their new friend revealed the solution. "That way they can share and split the separate merits of the trip." Upon hearing that, Leonard's attitude picked up and realized it was just the right answer. When he was at the hotel or out on the town, he'd be with Penny, and when he visited the Collider, Sheldon could be with him. He could split the whole difference between them. The solution was so simple. Even Howard grinned at the simplicity, and Raj nodded at the clarity and simplicity of it.

"That's perfect!" Leonard liked it.

"Why didn't we think of that?" Raj spoke up.

"I don't like it." Sheldon responded. Leonard, Raj and Howard all groaned out of frustration.

"Why?" Howard was first to snap. "What's wrong with it? What do you actually find wrong with that solution?" They looked at Sheldon. His mouth opened to respond, but he didn't say anything. He just froze trying to talk. He could confess that he just wanted to be selfish and egotistically horn in on Leonard's invitation; his own reason to go was the agreement that he had Leonard sign, but with his allowance to accompany Leonard fulfilled, he had no say in barring Penny from enjoying the guest ticket.

"Well, then, " Leonard had reason to rejoice. "I'm taking Penny and Sheldon is tagging along on his own dime." He lit up and shook his new friend's hand. "Thank you very much…"

"Don't mention it…" Their unnamed benefactor was glad to be of help. "But if you don't mind me adding, if your roommate was really such a good friend, he wouldn't have forced you into making such a unreasonable decision."

Sheldon looked up offended.

"Don't you know it." Leonard turned round to his table.


	2. Chapter 2

2

The suggestion worked perfectly. Leonard even borrowed a trick from Sheldon and made up a one-page promissory note that Sheldon had to sign to go along with the trip. It basically said that Sheldon was not allowed to interrupt or bother him as long as Penny was with him while they were on Swiss soil. However, as Sheldon pointed out, it did not involve the grounds at Los Angeles Airport or the flight itself, and Sheldon got tackled by airport attendants and dragged back into coach while Leonard and Penny enjoyed First Class. In Switzerland, Leonard was with Penny constantly, and left her only to get Sheldon to go see the Cern Super-Collider. The rest of the time, Sheldon was alone much of the time and annoying the locals with his fussy preferences and inability to quickly master the Swiss language. He was almost arrested at the end of the week when it came time to go home and get on with their regular lives and routines. Despite the trip, a few months later, Penny was forced to confront her feelings for Leonard. He loved her far more than she did him, and unable to make that sort of commitment, she broke up with him a few months later. He moped around a few days, pretended to ignore her another two weeks and then was mooning over her from afar once more as she was once again going through a string of short relationships.

"Hey…" He tried being friends with her as he arrived to get lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. "How you doing?"

"Just fine…" She was on duty at the hostess podium. "Where are the guys?"

"They're coming behind me…" Leonard tried making chitchat with her. "I had a doctor's appointment this morning and they're catching up with me here."

"Oh…okay…" Penny checked the seating. "So, how was it?"

"Okay, just okay…" Leonard spoke up. "I'm seeing someone… yeah… Uh, you don't know her, but…"

"I meant your doctor's appointment."

"Great…" Leonard grinned trying to hide his embarrassment. "Healthy as a Gundark…"

"That's a Star Trek reference, isn't it?"

"Yeah…" Leonard reacted unsure how to act. "Star Wars, actually…" He looked into the dining room. It looked as if every table was packed. "It looks kind of busy…."

"Yeah…" Penny looked around. "We got a party in the back…"

"Oh, wait…" Leonard looked again. "I remember that guy." He recognized his unidentified advisor from February. It was the guy who had solved the conundrum with the trip to Switzerland. Stepping past the family with the teenagers and the party of five, he strolled up to the table where his unidentified acquaintance sat alone at his table writing in a journal at the table. A partially finished hamburger and onion rings before him, he sat quietly and mentally-disconnected from the restaurant around him. Leonard strolled up to him and got his attention. Penny drifted off to help other customers.

"Hey…" His face lit up trying to be friendly. "Long time no see…"

"Yeah…" The brawny figure looked up. "How was your trip to Switzerland?"

"Great…" Leonard answered. "Went out without a hitch." He extended his hand. "I'm Leonard."

"James…" James Hoffman finally identified himself. He was a big guy, maybe about as tall as Sheldon, but he had a thicker non-muscular frame. He was young, maybe in his late twenties or early thirties. "James Hoffman…" He shook Leonard's hand. "You were the guy with the trip to the Cern Super-Collider. That makes you either a really big science geek or one of those scientists as Cal Tech."

"Well, the second one… both actually…" Leonard sat down and briefly looked up to see Penny pass behind James. "I'm researching and testing linear string theory. Yourself?"

"I'm a historian…" James finished off his burger in one bite and spoke before sipping his drink. "I also write historical fiction." He sipped his drink. "So, physics, huh? That's impressive."

"Yeah…" Leonard tried to be humble about it. "So, what you doing here in town? Doing research on something?"

"Actually, I was supposed to be meeting a guy here about an apartment," James responded. "But I don't think he's going to show."

"You need an apartment?" Leonard saw a chance to return his help. "I've got an apartment in my building."

"Actually, I've got the apartment, it's the roommate I'm looking for. " James clarified. "You see, I live in this big house by myself, and I'm just looking for someone to keep from being alone in it. I don't have a girlfriend right now, so I thought I'd rent the extra room to someone. You know someone who might be interested?"

"What kind of room is it?" Leonard reacted intrigued.

"It's just a room in the unused part of the house." James ate some of his onion rings. "It's outside my grandfather's old study."

"Your grandfather?" Leonard was a fuss for details.

"Abraham Reinhoff…" James placed his plates together as Bernadette, one of the waitresses, walked by and took it then left his bill in its platter. "He was actually one of the founding fathers of the early NASA program. "

"Your grandfather was Abraham Reinhoff?" Leonard's face was impressed. "I read his book, _Articles of Attraction Between Sub-Atomic Particles_! It was one of the books that made me want to be a physicist!" He paused to revel in his discovery. "Oh my god! So, whatever happened to him? Is he still around?"

"He passed away in 1975." James answered reflectively pensive. "After he retired from NASA, he got into private research working on some of Einstein's unpublished works. For a while, he was even trying to prove time travel was possible."

"Wow…" Leonard chuckled a bit excitedly. He was sitting across from a relative of one of his idols. He had so many questions, but he could barely think. "I would love to dive into his unpublished research."

"Well, it's still all laid out in his old study in the house." James had finished his meal and was sipping his iced tea. "Come by my place some time and I'll let you see it…" He paused a second. Leonard started mentally debating the situation. Here was a guy he had met and liked who had his best interests in heart and was looking for a roommate and possibly still had an attic of fascinating unpublished physics research. It was an opportunity that was too good to be true. He should jump on it, but he was holding back. His damned blind friendship with Sheldon was holding him back.

"So…" His voice stammered nervously. "Where's your house located?"

"A couple of blocks west of Cal Tech…" James was pulling a dollar from his wallet to leave as a tip. "Practically walking distance…"

"I'll take it." Leonard blurted out what he was thinking before he could stop himself. James had partially stood to get ready to leave…

"What?"

"I might be…" Leonard struggled a bit with his decision, but Sheldon's ego, eccentricities and psychotic rants were making it way too easy. "Interested…" He looked up to James like a young boy wondering what to do next. "…In the apartment." And then there was the matter with Penny; he didn't see the two of them getting together and seeing her constantly with other guys in the building was breaking his heart.

"Seriously?" James stopped where he was and reached to his shirt pocket. "Here's the address…" He handed over the directions on an index card. "Come by when you can to see it." He started for the cashier as Howard, Sheldon and Raj arrived. "And if you like, call me Jimmy…"

"Thanks…" Leonard lit up happy to have showed up here early. "Jimmy…" The guys recognized Jimmy as well and said their cordial hellos. Howard was surprised to meet him, and Raj very animatedly recognized him and shook his hand, but Sheldon was a bit more standoffish. Acknowledging Jimmy with a bird-like bob of his head, he accompanied the guys to join Leonard at the far table.

"Well, that's a face we've not seen in a long time." Howard referred to Jimmy and took his seat as Sheldon sat next to him and Raj sat down next to Leonard. "What did you guys talk about?"

"Not much…" Leonard had cause to grin like a peacock. "In fact, I might be moving into an extra room at his house."

"Why would you want to do that?" Sheldon took the menu out of routine despite the fact he was just going to order the same hamburger he always ordered.

"Because if we keep living together, I just might end up killing you in your sleep."

"Well, that's an extreme conclusion to jump to…" Sheldon snidely responded and scoffed at that notion. "What could I possibly have done to meditate that sort of hostility from yourself?"

"Do you really want to go there?"

"So, how's the Brainiac Club…" Penny had come over to take their orders. It was just a technicality; they almost always ordered the same thing every time they came in, but she still gave them the option.

"Brainac is a Superman villain." Sheldon tried to correct her comic book knowledge. "Why would we have a club named after him?"

"Better question…" Penny didn't really care about her comic book knowledge being accurate. "Why do these guys let you hang out with them?" She made him annoyed then raised her order pad. "So, guys, same as usual? Anything new?"

"Did you hear about Leonard getting a new apartment?" Howard spoke first.

"What?" Penny looked up surprised. Leonard embarrassingly fidgeted and postured in his seat by Howard upon being put on the spot. "Leonard?"

"I didn't say I was going to do it!" He tried to correct their thinking. "I was just going to think about it. He invited me over to look at it." He responded truthfully. "He even gave me his address." He showed it to Howard.

"Leonard isn't going to move." Sheldon postured and grinned. "He's got one. We're buddies. We're roommates. Why would he want to move?" He sat across from Leonard with that weird assured grin on his face. Leonard scowled at Sheldon thinking he knew him.

"You're making this decision so much more easier…" Leonard answered. Raj looked at the address Howard had taken from Leonard. Unable to speak in front of Penny, he whispered in Howard's ear to repeat for him what he said.

"I noticed!" Howard stopped Raj's poking and prodding. "Leonard, did you look at this address? This guy lives on Ocean Grove near the university! That's the most expensive part of town; it's like several of the biggest historic homes in the area. You've got to take me with you to see this place!"

"Seriously…" Leonard hadn't noticed. "Jimmy did say he lived alone in a big house…" He looked up to Penny. "Penny, you think I ought to move into this place?"

"Let me answer for her…" Sheldon spoke up and interrupted her. "Of course not. Leonard, we've got a good thing going. We're a team. You're the Robin to my Batman; the Jarvis to my Tony Stark. My Antonius Sverdoslovski to my Lord Raymond Gregorivich Dogunov…" He named two sets of comic book characters and two obscure biochemists to insinuate that Leonard was his sidekick. "Moving to this location is not a good idea. Could you put Superman in Gotham City and see him fight common street trash? No. Could you see Peter Parker going to work at the Daily Planet? I think not. Leonard, moving is never a good idea. Can't we all learn from the Val Kilmer fiasco that was Batman Three? Perfectly good movie franchise ruined because Michael Keaton left. Not only that, but if Jim Jones had not marched those people into Guiana in 1977, wouldn't all of them still be alive?" He looked across the table to their stunned and shocked faces. "Bottom line…" He continued. "You do not change a formula that works."

"I'm going to miss you most of all, Scarecrow…" Leonard mumbled.

"You're comparing Leonard moving out of the apartment…" Howard retorted. "…to Jim Jones and the People's Temple?"

"Yes…" Sheldon answered.

"Look…" That faded event was even a bit before Penny's time. "Leonard…" She placed her hand on his shoulder. "No one can make this decision for you. Now, I can understand why anyone would want to move away from someone as bat-crap crazy as Sheldon…" Penny looked at Sheldon offended by the reference. "But if you think this is the right thing for you, go for it." She excused herself to help another of her restaurant patrons.

"I'm not crazy…" Sheldon mumbled. "My mother had me tested."

"Dude…" Raj talked now that Penny was away from the table. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know…" Leonard thought about it and debated over it.


	3. Chapter 3

3

"Oh, no way, dude…" Raj was first to remark. Jimmy's address was one of the big homes on Ocean Grove all right and one of the most largest. It was a large walled in property with trails, trees and shrubbery covering an entire block. The house itself looked like something from a Stephen King novel. It was a two story tall brick and mortar structure with a front walkway that wrapped around the left of the house toward a distant attached greenhouse and an elaborate baroque roof with garret windows and wooden balustrades. Howard almost expected to see Bruce Wayne perched on the ledge as Batman. The driveway was lined from the gate and ended at a circled courtyard with a fountain at the middle and then a second narrow drive around the house. It must have had a hundred rooms inside. Leonard knew Jimmy had implied it was a big house, but this was a mansion with an elaborate style and detailed features that would have taken over a hundred Mexican laborers to build at the turn of the Nineteenth Century.

"This is Jimmy's place?" Howard was grinning.

"Must be…" Leonard stood amazed.

"Oh, big deal…" Sheldon acted like Sheldon. "It's just a large house. There are dozens of big houses in Pasadena."

"With unpublished research of one of NASA's founding fathers inside?" Leonard led the way up on to the porch where the roof extended over the front walkway.

"Well, that might be the one redeeming feature it has."

"Hey," Raj had been daydreaming. "Maybe it has a Bat-Cave."

"I seriously think it has a Bat-Cave." Leonard turned round to his friends at the double-doors of front entryway.

"Why?"

"Because we're not in a comic book!"

"The people in comic books don't know they're in comic books…" Howard pointed out.

"Look, guys…" Leonard rang the bell. "Please, just don't embarrass me."

"What could we possibly do to embarrass you?" Sheldon responded sourly. "Honestly…" The doorbell rang through the mansion a short staccato that sounded like a funeral dirge played through a nursery rhyme. Howard and Raj looked at each other as a sound of white noise squawked through a speaker system in the exterior entryway under the extended roof.

"Yes?" Jimmy's barely recognizable voice came out of it. "Can I help you?"

"Jimmy, it's me Leonard…" Leonard spoke up. "I came by to see the room."

"Hey, Leonard!" Jimmy's voice was much more animated in the returning message. "I'm on my way." The speaker squawked off. Behind Leonard, all he could hear was Sheldon's disapproving and disparaging tone while passing judgment. Leonard looked at him.

"What is your problem?" Howard asked.

"I don't have a problem…" Sheldon intoned. "I'm trying to keep you from making a mistake."

"What mistake?"

"I can't believe we're getting to see the inside of this place." Raj was as giddy as a kid on Christmas. "This place is almost as big as my parent's place in India. Do you know how many times I driven past this place? Lots!"

"Good for you…" Leonard heard Jimmy undoing the interior locks and latches before pulling on the heavy oak door to get it open. They almost expected to see him in a smoking jacket and smoking a pipe, but he instead appeared pretty much as they saw him at the Cheesecake Factory with the blue t-shirt and dark blue jeans with his mullet of dark hair crested on his shoulders.

"Hey, guys…" He waved them in. "Come on in…" He started pushing the door shut as the guys stepped on to polished black and white parquet floors and looked up to a domed ceiling with a round skylight in the ceiling flooding the room with natural light. The room was big enough to park a fleet of busses. It had two staircases before them to a balcony over the front door and a walkway heading straight back to the back of the room. It was bright and airy and reflected both wealth with the security of a nice home. The walls were painted white with black trim and wall niches for artwork. The floor itself looked like a huge white and black checkerboard leading to a long rear hall to a distant ballroom. To their left, they could see a dining room filled with a table and chairs; its entryway marked by two suits of armor while across from that was the library study, it's doors open to a bear head looking down over a grand desk with a modern computer on top. Howard walked around with his jaw hanging open, but Leonard took his glasses off, cleaned them and looked again to appreciate the interior even more. As Raj strolled over to look at the trophy case off to the side of the library entrance, Sheldon stood where he had stopped, arms behind him and head turning around like an eagle studying the horizons.

"Late Victorian…" He observed. "Some British and French influence… The suits of armor are reproductions…" He glanced to Jimmy. "Hardly original."

"Sheldon…" Leonard tried to control him.

"Is that your grandfather's study?" Sheldon looked to the right of the entryway and asked.

"No, it's mine…" Jimmy came around Howard ogling the statue of Venus on the second floor landing. "My grandfather liked peace and quiet when he worked so he knocked down the walls of a few upstairs bedrooms to create a study in the upstairs north wing." He turned to Leonard. "Leonard, would you like to see the room?"

"Yeah, sure!" Leonard followed Jimmy toward the staircase. "Jimmy, you didn't tell me you were rich." The guys followed behind him like tourists looking around and pointing out the bric-a-brac and furnishings. Sheldon followed behind disapprovingly listening but barely interested.

"I'm not rich." Jimmy lightly chuckled. "I've got a trust fund, but the house and grounds are covered by my grandfather's estate. I have to share ownership with my sisters even though they're married and live out of state." He reached the top landing, which ended at a balcony and a long hallway to the back of the house. "The house was originally built for a former governor of California in the 1890s, but he passed away before it was finished. It's been a hotel, stagecoach stop, dry goods store, meeting hall, brothel and even a saloon at one time or another." He entered the top corridor lined by old kerosene lamps re-wired into modern electric lights every fifteen feet. The ceiling was arched, and every twenty feet was another oak door to another room.

"Brothel…" Howard smirked trying to picture it.

"During Prohibition," Jimmy continued. "The house was owned by a mob figure named Ernie "The Tombstone" Brunner…"

"Why was he called that?" Raj asked.

"Because he used to be a funeral director before manufacturing illegal liquor…" Jimmy added. "And he hid the bodies of his dead rivals in the coffins of his normal clients." He headed to the end of the hall near a set of double doors before a balcony overlooking the back hall with high ceiling level windows with the view of the swimming pool. "After the FBI got him, they seized the house, and it stood empty for fifteen years until it was given as a gift to my grandfather for his work in the space program. The house has been modernized three times." He looked over to Sheldon shaking the locked doorknobs to the two-doored suite across from the bedroom. He shook them once, he shook them twice then he pressed his face to the crack trying to peek inside.

"I notice your friend has found grandpa's study." Jimmy watched Sheldon acting like a little boy on Christmas.

"You'll have to excuse Sheldon…" Leonard tried to apologize. "He's kind of got a one-track mind."

"And it frequently jumps the tracks." Howard quipped as Jimmy opened the bedroom. It was a large open room without a window, but it had two glass doors to an exterior balcony and a door to a personal bathroom. The bathroom was lightly dusty, just a small sink, toilet and a shower stall big enough for one person. Raj had opened one of the French doors to the closet, which was the same size as the bathroom in dimension but with a rack down one side for clothes and shelves along the other side. The bathroom had a small plate glass window and a tiled floor but except for a few pieces of furniture and the light fabric curtains on the doors, the room was very bare. It just had a double bed, a dresser and an old shelf with a few forgotten books on it. Howard picked up one of the books. It was a novel named "Percy Constance And the Road To Perdition" by Walt H. Birschott.

"Yeah…" Jimmy turned on the lamp. There weren't any bulbs in the overhead light fixture. "The author was a friend of my father. He crashed here a lot when I was a kid." Raj entered the bathroom and turned on the water to wash his hands with the tiny sliver of soap in the soap dish under the mirror. "Anyway, the back stairway goes down to the kitchen and the dining room. There's also a back entryway to the pool area with a shortcut to the garage if you prefer your own entry way, but you can pretty much get to any part of the house from anywhere through the front and back halls."

"This room is bigger than the one already got!" Leonard commented with a happy grin on his face. Sheldon meanwhile made a low nasally sound like a dying woodland creature trapped in a trap. Everyone heard it and looked at him in the hall.

"I mean…" Leonard looked back to Jimmy. "I could do so much with it."

Sheldon made the sound again.

"Dude…" Raj came out of the bathroom drying his hands with the one clean rag he found. "This place is so cool! If you don't move in here, I'll take it!"

Sheldon now sounded like a beached beluga whale trapped on its side on the rocks on Catalina Island. He paced backward and back again outside the room. Everyone looked out at him. Leonard just took an embarrassed deep breath, rolled his frustrated eyes and postured very humiliated over Sheldon's wounded antics.

"One question…" Howard had checked out the view and noticed teenaged girls sunbathing next door. He tried waving to them, but the trees obstructed much of his line of sight of them bouncing off their diving board. "Where do you play your computer games?"

"Game room." Jimmy answered.

"Can I see that?" Leonard asked.

"Sure…" Jimmy fastidiously relocked the balcony doors behind Howard and led the way out of the room. Instead of heading back to the front of the house, he turned left out of the room, through the arch outside the bedroom and left again down a curved stairway that ended at the bottom of the two rear twenty-foot high windows overlooking the garden and grounds. At the bottom, Jimmy passed the rear kitchen entrance to his right and passed through the grand dining room, a thirty-foot long room with a huge sectioned oak table for twenty guests. The walls were decorated with guns, swords and animals heads staring back with glass eyes. There was a full-figured bear, a moose head, a small aged alligator on the mantel and several small critters, birds and fish. Bringing up the rear, Sheldon sighed out of boredom then made the noise again.

"Stop making that noise!" Leonard stopped and confronted him.

"What noise?" Sheldon scoffed and continued through the other doors into the game room. While it was not as big as the dining room, it was large enough for two pool tables, a poker table and a chess game that had been log ago left unfinished. A large exterior closet was partially open and stocked with toys and games, but a few movie posters in glass frames decorated the paneled walls along with a sitting area off to the side under a huge flat screen mounted on the wall. The cabinet and floor under it was littered with a few games left over from Jimmy's youth.

"To tell the truth…" Jimmy apologized. "I don't come in here like I use to. I pretty much use it to entertain guests, but my nephews practically live down here when my sisters come home for Christmas and the summer."

"How long do they usually stay?" Leonard asked.

Sheldon made the noise again this time a bit louder than before. Leonard rolled his eyes up embarrassingly frustrated while Jimmy looked at him. Howard and Raj were checking out the old vintage games on the floor with the state of the art screen and entertainment system.

"Anywhere from a few weeks to two months…" Jimmy answered. "I've got five older sisters… almost had a older brother but he died before I was born." He looked to the guys. "So, Leonard… what do you think?"

"Well, I…"

"You know… this is all very well and good…" Sheldon cleared his throat, spoke up and acted as if he had Leonard's best interests at heart as he smirked and snidely postured his head back and forth trying to be cagey. "It's a big house. I'll give you that. It may have a lot of nice things in it…" He picked up one of the computer games. "Scooby Doo and the Secret of Skull Island." He shook his head disapproving. "I solved this when I was eight…" He tossed it into the chair behind Howard. "But Leonard isn't considering anything until I scrutinize the roommate agreement for him."

Leonard rolled his eyes.

"What kind of fascist forces someone to sign a roommate agreement?" Jimmy answered matter-of-factly.

Sheldon now made a face. Leonard changed his face as well from miserable embarrassment to choking back a laugh and hiding his huge grin.

"This place is looking better and better!" Leonard grinned ear to ear.

"Leonard…" Howard ecstatically strolled over. "You have got to move in here! Can you imagine us playing Worlds of Warcraft on that!" He pointed to the big screen. "It's practically big enough for us to play our characters full size!"

"Dude…" Raj was also grinning. "If you don't move in, I'm moving in!" He paused a second. "Can you imagine the chicks I'd be getting when I tell them I live in a mansion?"

"But who's going to talk to them." Sheldon reminded Raj of his selective mutism around the opposite sex. "Leonard…" He pulled Leonard aside. "You can't move in here. It's not normal. Living without a roommate agreement is chaos. No schedule, no rules, no co-habital routine… It would be anarchy. You wouldn't even have me to liven up your day with my intellectual observations and witty repertoire." He paused to make his queer lop-sided grin. "I'm telling you, if you might as well grow your hair out, get rid of your shoes and move to live in San Francisco with the other beatniks and hippies."

"Actually, I was thinking it sounds great." Leonard was grinning. "You know what the best part about this place is?"

"One flight of stairs?"

"You don't live here!" He screamed back. "Jimmy…" His voice had lowered when turned to his new best friend trying to straighten the room. A few errand game pieces from the floor into a bowl, the chair back under the poker table and the white rook back to the chess table, Jimmy turned back to Leonard. "I am so tempted to move in here."

Sheldon made that long grinding noise again. Everyone looked at him once more, but this time, Leonard was looking more angry than annoyed.

"It's a beautiful house."

Sheldon groaned again.

"The room is perfect."

Sheldon sounded as if he was an android winding down.

"It more than cuts down in my commute to work…"

The beached whale groan returned again.

"I'd be a fool to turn it down, but…"

Sheldon now sounded like one of the main characters in George Romero's _Night of the Living Dead_.

"I'll take it!" Leonard suddenly announced out of nowhere. "Two hundred a month rent?"

Howard and Rajesh cheered and started dancing ready to install and play their own games. Sheldon finally drew quiet. His mouth fell open, and his body lightly trembled and quivered like a small cat hanging on to a branch in a huge wind. Big deal. His next roommate at the apartment would be better. He will just find a guy three times better than Leonard, someone would be his mental and intellectual equal in any way. His eyes, however, now glared toward Jimmy the same way John Wilkes Booth must have stared the first time to a presidential speech by Abraham Lincoln. It was a combination of hurt pride, shattered ego and upset anger.

"I can let you do better than that." He directed Leonard and the guys back through the dining room. "Come on, I'll show you the side driveway to get your stuff in…" He stopped smiling, hesitated and stood face to face with Sheldon. "Dude, I've got five older sisters… I've already been to hell and back."


	4. Chapter 4

4

Wednesday morning, Sheldon was up by itself in an empty apartment using the bathroom on time at 8AM, preening himself by 8:15 and eating breakfast at 8:30. The place was so quiet, but he looked around the room looking for someone to talk to and share his thoughts. A light sigh and he realized how much he had become used to having another life form in the apartment with him for company. By 8:45, he was clean and dressed and ready to head to work, but who was going to drive him now that Leonard was out of his life.

"Penny?" He knocked at the door of the resident blonde neighbor across the hall who once dated Leonard. "Penny?" He knocked again, but then his pattern of behavior made him knock again. "Penny?"

"What?" She opened the door rudely awakened and not ready to spare any one's feelings. Her eyes were flared, and her eyebrows were furrowed. Her teeth were clenched in angry frustration. What idiot dared wake her at this time in the morning?

"Time to drive me to work!" Sheldon stood at her door with a hesitant eagerness.

"What?" Penny was still half asleep. "Why can't Leonard do it?"

"Well, because despite after all my logical reasons and convincing arguments persuading him it wasn't it a good idea," Sheldon responded. "Leonard moved out."

"What?" Penny suddenly woke up. "What do you mean he moved out?"

"I don't understand." Sheldon was stymied by her surprise to the fact. "What part of moving out do you not understand? I mean, he and the guys packed up his stuff and transferred it to a new location."

"What?"

"Penny," Sheldon sighed. "I don't know how much more simpler I could put it." She marched past him to the guys' apartment and pulled on the door, but Sheldon had already locked it. Swatting and hitting Sheldon to unlock it, she barged forward in her shorts and tank top and tread in her bare feet through the apartment and down the hall to Leonard's room. Nothing looked amiss yet, but when she pushed open his door, she was taken aback. The room was stripped clean. It was empty down to the carpet. The closet was vacant of his clothes and collectibles. Penny's eyes widened in stunned surprise, and her hands came up to cover her shocked and overwhelming alarm. Not a poster was left, not a stick of furniture was left… Gone were the comic books, action figures, Star Wars bed sheets, Star Wars curtains, his Star Trek uniform, his Battlestar Galactica flight suit, the model of the Lost City of Kandor, it was all gone. The room was as barren and empty as the day Leonard had moved into it.

"Oh, my god…" Penny's eyes were crying, and her hands were trembling. "He did it. He actually did it. He moved out…"

"Penny…" Sheldon was ready to go. "If you're driving me, we should really leave now to beat the traffic."

"I should have told him not to move…" Penny was deep into her shock. "He wanted my advice, and I didn't give it."

"Penny…" Sheldon tried to understand what was happening. "If you're thinking of moving in here, I don't think it would work out. My mother wouldn't like it if I shared the place with a member of the opposite gender." Penny grew tired of his rambling and grabbed the back of his underwear from out of his shorts, yanking it up like the wedgies he knew so well from high school. Sheldon suddenly screamed like a girl as parts of his external anatomy went where they were not meant to go.

"Where'd he move?" She hissed at him. "Where'd he move?"

"Thirty-Eight Fifteen North Ocean Grove!" Sheldon's voice went briefly ultra-sonic until she let him go and raced out of the room. Hopping briefly like a one-legged kangaroo, he got his male genitalia back where they belonged and braced himself on the wall to catch his breath. "Yee-ow!" He fought to catch his breath. "It's grammar school all over again! It does still hurt fifteen years later…" He walked out of the room like a cartoon character with his body bouncing up and down and his feet jostling to try and loosen his underwear pulled up tight around his buttocks. Walking down the hall, he ambled along trying to loosen his underwear through the seat of his pants then noticed Penny sitting distraughtly on his sofa. Her hands held her head up, her knees were together with her feet apart. She looked as if she was crying.

"I thought you were going after Leonard." He asked.

"I can't!" She sobbed. "If I go after him, he'll just think I want to get back together with him." She didn't even look up.

"Do you want to get back together with him?" Sheldon asked.

"No…"

"Then what's the problem?"

Penny lifted her head.

"I think I'm just now realizing I made a major mistake breaking up with him." She confessed to herself.

"Oh…" Sheldon heard her. He checked his watch and paused a second. He looked back to Penny.

"You're in my spot…"

Over on Ocean Grove, Leonard woke in his new room. Taking a moment to realize where he was, he looked at his watch. It was just a little past quarter to nine in the morning, but he no longer had to get up early to beat the traffic and use the bathroom as according to Sheldon's schedule. He had his own bathroom and a nice wide closet with shelves to display more of his figures. It had only taken around three hours with Jimmy and the guys to carry his stuff in last night. The whole ordeal was sort of like a party using the back stairway and electric-powered dumb waiter while eating pizza in the kitchen in between trips. Most of Leonard's stuff was still loosely packed up, but Jimmy had provided him the fresh linens for the bed, the new light bulbs for the light fixture and fresh towels for the bathroom. Not sure if he should go down in his robe, he instead showered and shaved ready to head to work at the university and came down dressed and clean and ready to face the day.

"There's my little buddy…" Jimmy had a habit of imitating voices of characters from popular media like the Skipper from "Gilligan's Island." Leonard was not quite familiar with that show despite its popularity as a TV icon; he'd only seen it a few times. "Like some eggs?" He was scrambling eggs for himself while cooking his sausage in the microwave and making toast in the toaster. Leonard noticed the coffee pot and poured himself some coffee.

"Sure…" He sounded. "Sounds great!"

"How'd you sleep?"

"It's so quiet here!" Leonard sipped his coffee from a mug he took off a hook hanging off the counter. "I don't think I've ever slept so soundly before." Jimmy gave him his own eggs and toast then made new eggs for himself. "I've never eaten eggs on Waffle Day either!"

"Waffle Day?"

"Sheldon only eats waffles on Wednesdays." Leonard sat at the counter seats. "French Toast Thursdays, Scrambled Egg Fridays…"

"Why did you stay so long with that guy?"

"It wasn't always bad." Leonard confessed. "After a certain point, you just sort of got into the stream of things…" He took the saltshaker and lightly salted his eggs. "Problem was, I couldn't stop him from hitting the rocks!" He watched as Jimmy placed the salt back in its place. The toast popped out of the toaster.

"Leonard…" Jimmy offered Leonard some sausage from the microwave when it buzzed then handed him the butter for the toast. "No offense, but if I had lived with the guy, I'd have bludgeoned him in his sleep a long time ago."

"Don't get me wrong; we were friends too…" Leonard buttered his toast and placed some of his eggs on it before eating it. "We had a lot of good memories; the worst parts were went he went completely unpredictable." He sipped his coffee. "When Sheldon stayed predictable, he was okay. The problem was when he broke script." He finished off his coffee. "It was like living a TV series that couldn't stay on single network. You got any juice?"

"Refrigerator." Jimmy made his plate then turned off the stove to wipe the frying pan of excess oil before placing it and the spatula in the dishwasher. He also recovered the butter dish and took it with him to the table to sit down in a routine he had down pat. Leonard felt he was watching a distinct choreography as Jimmy carried his breakfast, the butter and utensils to the table then came and took out the orange juice Leonard had just put into the refrigerator, poured a small glass and place it back before closing the refrigerator and finally sitting down. He started wondering if he had left one obsessive-compulsive for another one.

"How long did you live alone here?"

"Uh…" Jimmy salted his eggs then placed the salt back into the stand. "Let's see…" He thought about it. "Sara married two or three Christmases ago…" He tried to count how many times his older sister had been back home since moving to Sacramento. "My nephew, Charlie, is starting the first grade…" He paused a bit confused. "Kate accused me of missing her twenty-eight birthday…"

"Another sister?"

"My old girlfriend…" Jimmy revealed. "She was half a year younger than me… Eight years? That can't be right!"

"Eight years?" Leonard joined him at the table.

"No, that can't be right!" Jimmy looked confused. "Sara's only been gone for three years!"

Leonard looked around the room. It was modernized turn of the century kitchen with a heat induction stove, industrial refrigerator and granite counter top with a steel plated sink, but there was still an old-fashioned wood-burning stove against the wall as decoration. The sink faced the window to the side of the house, and the dishwasher was at the bottom of a cabinet next to it. The stove was part of the center island in the middle of the room with a far door to the pantry and the dining room at the front of the house. By the door to the pantry was a calendar for October 1998.

"Something tells me she's been gone a lot longer than three years." He rolled his eyes. "How many kids does she have?"

"Two."

"How old are they?"

"Five and Seven."

"Are you sure they aren't maybe twelve and fourteen?"

"Yes."

Leonard pointed to the calendar. Jimmy looked up to it then turned back feeling like an old man.

"I was supposed to replace that in 2003!"

"2003 or 1993?"

"Like I said, Leonard…" Jimmy had turned from a young guy in his late Twenties to a guy in his mid-Thirties in a few minutes. "There are parts of this house I've not been inside of in a long time."

"Yeah…" Leonard sipped his juice. "Uh, when are you going to let me see your grandfather's study?"

"I already tried getting into it." Jimmy confessed as he spooned some eggs. "The key snapped in the lock. I'm going to have to get a locksmith for it."

"Why do I get the strange feeling there are Christmas gifts hidden in there from 1987?"

"For all I know, my grandmother's still in there!"


	5. Chapter 5

5

Leonard's first day at Cal Tech after moving out of the apartment was expected to be awkward in case he ran into Sheldon. When he arrived and met Howard and Sheldon, they were quick to ask permission to come over after work and play the video games they were ready to bring over. That was easily predictable. At first, Leonard was reticent, but then he recalled how Jimmy had promised they could use the swimming pool when it was clean and ready to go swimming in again. Sheldon was another problem. When they all passed by his office, they heard the siren call of the lonely beached whale again.

"Listen…" Howard posed like an old seaman. "It's the call of the ancient sea mariner." He listened for Sheldon by placing his hand to his ear. "They say these nights you can hear his lonely pathetic voice droning on and on and on… It never stops!"

Raj laughed at the exaggeration, but Leonard just grinned and chuckled.

"Very amusing…" Sheldon stood at his research board of physics symbols and turned to face them. "But then, I never really needed a roommate. I do the best work when I'm not distracted by social commitments and the day-to-day trivialities and banal commentaries of small brained life forms."

"Really?" Leonard replied. "Who drove you to work?"

"Penny…" Sheldon answered. "Although, I kind of suspect that solution is not possible tomorrow since she dropped me off fifteen blocks away." He responded distractedly perturbed by the incident. "Anyhow, I'm doing very well by myself."

"How so?" Raj asked.

"Several ways."

"Name one." Howard asked.

"I can…" Sheldon tried to think. What did he do last night? Well, he had tried blowing up Jimmy's head with his brain as he had seen in a movie, but all he had succeeded in was giving himself a headache. He had played Klingon chess with himself, watched the TV series "Firefly" on DVD and made himself a snow cone. "Oh, I can watch TV and talk back to the characters."

"Do you hear them talking back?" Raj asked.

"No, drat…" Sheldon did not get the crazy reference.

"Sheldon…" Leonard was actually feeling sorry for him. "Look, just because I don't live there anymore doesn't mean we have to stop being friends. You can come see me anytime you want."

"How I am going to get there?" Sheldon stood and furled his arms over each other on his chest.

"The bus…"

"The bus?" Sheldon did not ride the bus. "Leonard…" He made a face that meant Leonard should have known better.

"That's right; you don't ride the bus. Well, maybe the guys…" He looked to Howard and Raj shaking their heads than start driving Sheldon anywhere. He looked back to Sheldon. "I'm sure your next roommate will drive you." He nodded courteously and walked a few feet. "If you can find anyone else crazy enough to sign that horrible roommate agreement."

"I heard that!" Sheldon responded a bit annoyed. "For the love of God, Leonard. The guy doesn't even have a doctorate."

"Not everyone needs a doctorate!"

"I don't have a doctorate." Howard pointed out.

"You see!" Sheldon gestured to Howard. "Howard supports me!"

"Dr. Cooper!" Professor Charles Seibert was the head administrator for the physics department and their head. He had started walking by them at the end of the hall, briefly noticed the guys out the corner of his eye and stepped back to meet his little team. "How's my favorite physicist?"

"I thought I was your favorite physicist?" Sheldon spoke up.

"You're up there." He acknowledged the group as doctors, but strongly acknowledged Howard as Mr. Wolowitz, the only one without a doctorate. "Leonard, a little bird tells me you're now staying at the Old Reinhoff House with Dr. Hoffman…"

"Dr. Hoffman?" The news caught the guys by surprise – perhaps Sheldon most of all.

"Of course…" Sheldon's ego was slightly deflated.

"Yes…" Seibert added. "Jimmy and I are friends from way back. He was an anthropologist for three years until he went on sabbatical and never left."

"He didn't tell me he had a doctorate…" Leonard was stunned. He wondered why Jimmy never talked about it. "Where did you hear I was now staying with Jimmy?"

"Hey, Coopah…" Barry Kripke wandered through the hall. "Nice job, moving up…"

"Hey, Leonard…" Leslie Winkle came from the direction Barry had vanished and passed them going the other way. "Can't wait to see the new place." She clicked her tongue at Leonard then noticed at Sheldon. "Hey, Dumb-Ass…" Sheldon started burning. Howard and Raj started chuckling and trying to hold back the laughter.

"News travels fast…" Siebert mentioned and slightly postured. "Little request… our investors meet-and-greet fund-raiser is coming up again, and I would so love to see the inside of Jimmy's house again. Think you could swing letting the department hold the fund-raiser at your new place?"

"Oh, I don't know…" Leonard hated being put on the spot. "I mean… I just now moved in there. I'd hate to start pulling favors on Jimmy."

"No pressure, no pressure…" Siebert grinned as if it was a sure thing and turned away. "By the way, the caterers are showing up this Wednesday night at six o'clock."

"Crap…" Leonard cringed and fumbled with his cell phone to call Jimmy before he got the news. Siebert continued his journey, and Howard and Raj came in tight around Leonard trying to call and warn his new roommate of the unplanned party. Sheldon was acting a bit smug. He was hoping on a bit of turmoil between Leonard and Jimmy to occur between them.

"So, Leonard…" Sheldon spoke affirmatively and assuredly as if he had predictions for this news. "How do you think Jimmy is going to like two hundred people treading through his house?"

"I don't think Dr. Jimmy's going to be happy." Raj was chuckling.

"What are you guys worried about?" Howard scoffed. "Jimmy's a good guy. He won't mind." Leonard hadn't put Jimmy's phone number into his cell phone yet. He had to go by the note he still had in his pocket. He typed out the number and pressed his phone to his ear.

"Welcome to Mars…" Jimmy answered the phone in his study. "I'll be Judy, your cruise director…." He referred to another classic TV show from his youth.

"Jimmy, it's me…"

"Hey, Leonard…" Jimmy punched the button for his speakerphone at his desk and hung up the receiver to keep his hands free. His wood desk was covered with his files on the Minoan Civilization and notes for a novel focused on Hellenic Greece before the Trojan War. "What's up?" A female mannequin dressed up as the goddess Aphrodite with a Marilyn Monroe haircut and dark sunglasses watched over him from the door to his private bathroom.

"Jimmy…" Leonard noticed the guys trying to eavesdrop on his conversation. "Uh, well, do you know Doctor Siebert here at the university?"

"Yeah…" Jimmy paused a moment. "How's Dr. Chucky?"

"Well…" Leonard blinked a bit and looked back at the guys. Howard and Raj were trying to hold back the derisive laughter. "He kind of learned we're roommates now and scheduled our yearly fund-raiser at the house."

"This house?" Jimmy asked.

"Your house…"

"Crap and a half…." Jimmy made a face, twisted his head back and forth out of frustrated reluctance and groaned briefly under his breath.

"Are you angry?"

"Leonard, look…" Jimmy paused over his complicated feelings for an old friend. "I'm not angry. I'll live with it. I'm a bit annoyed that he went through you with the request, but…." He paused again. "You got to understand. My friendship with Chuck has been strained for a few years. He treated me as his personal piggy bank and called me selfish when I cut him off. If this is how he's trying to bury the hatchet, I'll extend the proverbial olive leaf back. I'm just sorry he's using you to get close to me again."

"Okay…" Leonard understood the facts behind the situation.

"By the way…" Jimmy leaned back in his chair with a book. "The locksmith just left. He got my grandfather's study open. This is for your ears only. Don't tell Sheldon."

Leonard looked to Sheldon listening by his right side. Sheldon looked back to Leonard.

"I won't tell him a word." Leonard made a promise he knew he could keep. "By the way, why didn't you tell me you had a doctorate?"

Jimmy looked at his phone not expecting that reference.

"Doctor Blabbermouth?" He asked.

"One and the same."


	6. Chapter 6

6

This was the story Leonard heard it from Jimmy. Born James Theodore Hoffman, Jimmy was raised the son of architect and contractor Gregory William Hoffman and Christine Angelique Reinhoff, a botanist. He was the youngest of six children. His oldest sister, Gwen, was a landscaper now living in Utah with her husband and daughter. Alicia had been born next; she was now a surgeon in Seattle, living with her life partner for now on nine years. Russell Michael Hoffman had been the first son born, but he got sick in the house and passed away at only a year and a half. While the house was in its most recent renovation, the family had lived in San Antonio where Jessica and Melissa had been born. Jessica still lived there as a history teacher, but Melissa was now a physical therapist in Reno, Nevada. Sara was the first one born upon moving back home to Pasadena, and Jimmy was born the following year. Sara had attended the Eastland Academy near Ojai, same as her sisters, and now, she lived in Sacramento as a family therapist. Jimmy, however, had been one of the last students to attend Hastings Academy in Oxnard before it closed down, and he specialized in anthropology with a minor in archaeology at Southwestern Maine University, pulling his internship down in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington D.C. before acquiring his doctorate at the age of twenty-two. In 2002, he was in Alaska analyzing Native American remains when a group of men calling themselves the Children of the Confederacy took over the camp, held him and the others captive and declared war on the U.S. Government. Jimmy was rescued by the FBI eighteen days later and had a nervous breakdown afterward, but he never did any work in the field again. He vanished into the family home in Pasadena, gained weight watching old TV shows and playing computer games and was pulled back into the real world by his mother and two of his sisters. Three girlfriends later, he was still single except for an imaginary marriage he had with actress Reese Witherspoon that existed in his head. Leonard understood him a bit better after that talk, and they bonded a little. Warned that Sheldon was on the way over to get into the upstairs study, Jimmy locked the new deadbolt on the door of his grandfather's study and pretended to vanish for a few hours, leaving the guys to play World of Warcraft on the giant screen in the game room. According to Leonard, Jimmy had a headache from the noise.

"Raj, watch for the troll!" Leonard and the guys fought three-dimensional computer generated creatures in the fake reality. They were spells going off, sword fights and fake explosions going on around them.

"I'm boxed in!" Raj hit the buttons on his pad fast and furious. "Someone! Cover me!"

"I got you, little buddy!" Howard went sword to sword with a giant warrior. Sheldon was their spell-caster. His animated character tossed exploding balls and fired mystical forces as they fought to get into a cursed church for the mystic weapons they needed on their next quest.

"Leonard!" Sheldon tossed spell after spell at trolls, giants and ogres. "I'm going in!"

"But you're going to get killed!"

"Then I'll see you in hell!" They took the game very seriously. Sheldon's character now raced forward into the church just as a succubus attacked him from the church rafters. "Oh, lord, where'd she come from?"

"Maybe she smells Howard's aftershave!" Raj laughed.

"I got a date with Bernadette tonight!" Howard screamed back. "Lay off!" He moved to shoot arrows into an ogre, but the game froze up and the word "PAUSE" popped up on screen. Raj and Sheldon recessed from their furious game playing and looked to Leonard.

"What's that noise?" Raj heard a sound that didn't come from the game. It was a buzzing sound from the ceiling fixture.

"It's the intercom at the front door…" Leonard announced. He looked around for the pad and found it at the entry to the hall toward the front of the house. He pushed the button for the flashing light. "Yes?"

"Leonard, it's me, Penny…" His former girlfriend stood at the front door carrying a pie for him. "Can I come in?"

"Oh, what is she doing here?" Sheldon commiserated.

"Yeah, just a second…" Leonard turned the intercom off and looked to the guys. "I'm going to go let her in."

"But what about the game?" Raj asked.

"We can finish it later." Leonard followed the hall past the downstairs bathroom where it opened up near Jimmy's library and study. Turning right, he passed the trophy case and the front foyer as the guys followed behind him. Sheldon exhaled a deep breath, and Howard checked his watch wondering if he should leave early to pick up Bernadette from the Cheesecake Factory. Raj came around and sat at the bottom of the staircase as Leonard popped the locks and undid the latches at the entryway to let Penny inside to see the place.

"Hey, Leonard…." Penny peeked in and recognized his face. "I just… Oh-my-freaking-God…" She looked around the interior. It was huge! It might have been an airplane hangar. The stairs were either side of the doorway with a balcony over the front entryway and a walkway over their heads to the upstairs corridor. "This room is bigger than my parent's house!"

"Yeah," Leonard grinned happy to see her. "Isn't it great?"

"Yeah…" She walked around in a circle trying to take it all in with the pie in her hands. "Oh, uh, yeah… I brought you a pie." She handed it to him. "It's just one of the day olds from the restaurant…"

"This is great." He looked back at her and felt some nervous and awkward sexual tension between them. He cleared his throat and she looked remiss as she scanned the foyer once more. She looked to the walkway over their heads and followed it down the staircase with her eyes to where the guys were standing and waiting for Leonard to return to the game.

"What's he doing here?" She looked at Sheldon.

"Visiting Leonard…" Sheldon responded.

"Honestly, Leonard…" Penny looked at him. "If you let him in the house once, you'll never get rid of him."

"Don't worry, I sprayed…" Leonard grinned. "Hey, would you like to see the place?"

"Yeah…"

"Leonard, what about the game?" Howard spoke up.

"We'll finish it tomorrow." Leonard started showing Penny to the front dining room.

"Oh, I might have known…" Sheldon grumbled as he commiserated his luck. "Leonard following his hormones again instead of logic." He looked to Howard. "Come for the science, outed by the biology…" He felt annoyed and disgruntled by the lack of attention. "Who's driving me home?"

"I'm picking Bernadette up at work." Howard was backing up to the hallway to the rear of the house. He turned and nearly smacked into the downstairs table with the flowers on it. Sheldon turned to Raj.

"Raj," Sheldon followed him to the doors. "Could you run me home?"

"Yeah, I guess so…" Raj relented. "But… you're not allowed to talk while I'm driving."

"Fine, fine…" Sheldon had another idea what not talking meant. "But could you run me by the post office first. I'm out of stamps…"

"Okay…"

"And by the comic book store…"

Raj made one pathetic look back to Leonard in the dining room looking for pity. Annoyed, he rolled his eyes exasperatedly and headed toward the front door to let himself out on the way home. Sheldon was right behind him. Once outside, Howard rolled by on his motor scooter and shot toward the open gate.

"He's out of the car in three blocks… five blocks, tops…" Leonard referred to Sheldon with Raj, placed the pie on the table and looked back to Penny before the fireplace in the dining room. Penny lightly giggled a bit.

"So, Leonard," She turned her head toward him and walked around the table looking over the family pictures on the walls, the Old English Furniture and the heavy oak dinner table. The room was like a museum display except for the signs of occupation. A stray glass was left near the centerpiece, and the dust in the bookcase was somewhat disturbed. The easy chair by the fireplace had a book left face down in it, and the firewood in the mantel was recent, scorched on top but untouched on the ends. "How do you like it here?" She asked.

"It's great." Leonard replied. "There's no one here to wake me in the middle of the night, my bathroom routine is no longer dictated by a schedule, Jimmy doesn't make any unreasonable claims and best of all, I don't have to drag him around like an albatross around my neck."

"Yeah," Penny peaked into the pantry on the way to the kitchen. "I guess there's nothing to make you want to come back to living with Sheldon." She looked around noncommittally.

"God, no!" Leonard stood by the dish cabinet. "I'd much rather go swimming in shark-infested waters with a hunk of beef around my neck!"

"I was afraid of that…" Penny looked around once more and then back to him. She wasn't sure what had happened next, but the next thing she knew, she was grabbing Leonard and pressing her lips to his and his hands were reaching up the back of her shirt. An emotional dam had shattered as feelings and unrequited emotions too powerful for them came over them and had them gasping and moaning once more. Leonard felt a chill, clapped his hands and the electronic starter in the fireplace that Jimmy had showed him had the fire in the fireplace going to full blaze. There was giggling and gasping for breath and a bond between them once more as they reverted to teenagers. The heavy oak table rattled a bit, a chair got budged a bit and a floor lamp got knocked over as passion ignited between the two lovers. They weren't sure how long they had surrendered to the feelings they were trying to keep from realizing, but Penny suddenly heard something and cocked her head up looking around like a prairie dog sticking its head from the sand.

"What was that?" She heard a noise from the next room.

"Nothing…." Leonard kissed her neck again.

"Leonard, you here?" Jimmy's voice called out as he carried a bucket of chicken in a plastic bag in through the side entrance and into the kitchen. He set it on the kitchen counter and shuddered once grateful to be home. What had started out as a sunny day had turned dark and wet. Not predicting the rain, he shivered lightly from the cold a moment and walked over to the intercom system. Having seen Leonard's car outside with the other car, he figured Leonard had company. He pushed the button to buzz the house.

"Leonard, I got dinner…" He announced.

"I'm not hungry…" Leonard buzzed from the front dining room. He sounded out of breath and struggling with something.

"What about your guest?"

"She's not hungry."

"It's a girl?"

"Yeah…" Leonard zipped up his pants and looked to Penny pulling her shoes on then heard Jimmy's shoes on the hardwood floor in the pantry between the dining room and the kitchen. He was coming to meet Penny, but she was struggling with her last shoe and Leonard was still just in his socks with his shirt not tucked into his pants. Cursing under breath, he tried to dash Penny out to the back door, but Jimmy's path was just a bit shorter and he saw them both from the downstairs hall.

"Leonard…" Jimmy stood and watched them stop short of the entryway. "What's your hurry?" Penny's head turned to look over her left shoulder; her long slightly mussed hair flailing a bit as she turned to meet him. Hiding her one shoe behind her back, she watched as Jimmy came up to meet her.

"Jimmy, Penny…" Leonard introduced them. "Penny, Jimmy… She works at the Cheesecake Factory."

"Leonard's old girlfriend…" Jimmy remembered.

"Yeah, old… old girlfriend." She tried to imply their recent soiree didn't mean they were back together.

"Yeah," Leonard nervously agreed and adjusted his glasses. "I showed her the house."

"How do you like it?'

"It's a beautiful house."

"So, Jimmy, how was your day?" Leonard asked.

"Oh," Jimmy responded. "I went to go see that movie, "Night at Hawksmoor Hill" with Mila Kunis, Ashley Tisdale and Justin Bieber. It's a teenage horror movie light on script but heavy with atmosphere."

"Yeah, I auditioned for that." Penny confessed. "Damn Ashley Tisdale." She mumbled under breath before the front doors. "Well, I ought to get going…" She grinned and turned backward to keep Jimmy from seeing her one shoe off, but when she opened the one left side door, she got hit by a blast of cold wet air and noticed a stream of water pouring from the cover over the front porch. The architecture of the place had muffled the storm outside and kept them from hearing it. The wind whistled and blew rain inside, and the front driveway was covered in water from one end to another. Mud stretched across the asphalt driveway, and the water fountain was flooded and nearly running over. The skies were a dark gray from west to east the trees in the property were swaying from the breeze. Distant thunder sounded overhead. Her car was twenty feet down off the porch. She'd be drenched by time she made it.

"It's kind of miserable out…" Jimmy mentioned. "Look, I don't feel right sending you out in the rain. Why don't you stay the night with us and leave in the morning? You can sleep in my sister's room."

"Oh, I don't know…" Penny was hesitant.

"I think it's a great idea." Leonard liked the suggestion and started grinning. "Penny, wouldn't you like to stay the night?"

"That's okay…" Penny looked at him. "So I'll get a little wet, and it's only a twenty-five minute drive home on the highway…" Thunder cracked a bit closer, and she looked out wondering whatever gods were trying to get her and Leonard back together. "Where's your sister's room again?"

"Top of the stairs, second door to the left…" Jimmy stood with his arms folded over his navy blue shirt.

"Thank-you…" She turned for the stairway.

"I'll show you the way…" Leonard turned toward her.

"Leonard…"

"Yes, Jimmy…"

"You're going to be a gentleman and stay out of her room for the night, aren't you?" Jimmy didn't turn around. He wasn't stupid. Leonard might have showed Penny the house, but that only would have taken him fifteen to twenty minutes at the most, and judging by the dirt washed off from Penny's car from the rain, they had been here at least more than an hour, and Leonard did sound out of breath on the intercom and in a hurry to get Penny out of the house when he found them.

"Yeah…"

"Good boy…" He turned back for the kitchen to make plates for Leonard, himself and his guest.


	7. Chapter 7

7

It might have been a boring night for Leonard, but Jimmy liked hearing Penny's stories of life in Nebraska over dinner, growing up on a baseball team and her family's antics. Having grown up in a family with a strict schedule regime, private schools and very little adversity of any at all, he liked hearing about that sort of homespun Norman Rockwell rural life from Penny's brother trying to put a jet engine in an old Oldsmobile, her cousin blowing up a deserted barn with homemade hooch to her uncle sending a jeep home from Korea piece by piece through the mail to be put back together again later. At around midnight, as the rain had decreased to light spring showers, Penny thanked Jimmy for his kindness and retreated up to Sara's room, replete with a canopy bed, twelve stuffed bears and a closet and drawers still filled with clothes. In the morning after a breakfast of sausage biscuits and orange juice, she made the drive back home to her apartment on Los Robles Avenue, but it was a trip from one world to another. As she ascended the fourth floor walk-up with the busted elevator, she heard yelling, screams and angry shouting.

"You're nuts!" An African-American guy came running out the guys' apartment. "I'd rather live with my ex-wife another month than live with you!" He furled a bag pack of clothes in his fist and started to head out. "Someone like you shouldn't be allowed on the street!"

Penny watched from her door as Mr. Angry Man stormed down the steps to the third floor. She looked up to Sheldon in the apartment.

"Sheldon…" She had to ask. "What happened?"

"He wasn't for me." Sheldon answered. "I didn't like the way he said "often." There's a "T" in there everyone seems to forget."

"But he was the first guy to look at the apartment!"

"Actually he was number three…" Sheldon revealed. "The first person to come by was from San Francisco, and I can't live with a gypsy." He paused briefly. "The second person worked as a masseuse, and just can't allow those kind of people to live around here."

"Wow…" Penny responded stunned by his extreme ignorance and turned away to unlock her apartment.

"Penny…" Sheldon called on her. "Do you think there's anyway you could talk Leonard into coming back home? For some reason, despite your reputation as a community college drop-out, he really seems to care about what you say to him."

Penny had her door open and looked back at him for inserting an insult into his plea for help.

"Sheldon…" She tried to help him. "Don't you think the problem could be that Roommate Agreement you make everyone sign?"

"No, that's not it…"

"You know…" She started. "I bet Leonard might even come back if you got rid of it."

"Penny," Sheldon looked to her big blue eyes. "You know I can't do that."

"Well…" She had tried. "See hello to a lot of screaming…" She unlocked her door and turned back to her apartment in order to get ready for her afternoon shift at the restaurant.

"Penny?"

"Yes?"

"Could you drive me to work?'

She looked away annoyed.

"Okay…." She groaned with a roll of her eyes.

"Could you also drive me by the post office and by the comic book store after work?"

"Didn't Raj take you yesterday?"

"No…" Sheldon responded matter-of-factly. "He dropped me off at the turn-off to his place."

"Leonard was right…" Penny thought back. "That's about five blocks." Already regretting the favor, she slipped into her apartment and was back out a few minutes later to drive Sheldon to Cal Tech, reminding herself to stay on Los Robles than listen to his commentary about the speed bumps on the other quicker route, but still that did not stop Sheldon from rambling on about the minutiae of his day. Meanwhile, the caterers had appeared at Jimmy's house to set up for the investors meeting. He showed them the side entrance for the shortest way to the kitchen and they immediately took it over with people preparing the dining room into a gathering hall with a spread of finger foods. Another team cleaned and prepared the rear pool area for the guests, but Jimmy was going through pulling gates and doors to lock and seal off the upstairs and the front of the house from the guests. When Siebert showed up to check the progress, it was almost as if the last few years had never happened. They were talking, sharing news between each other and no longer bearing any ill will to each other. Charles revealed his daughter was now fifteen, and Jimmy revealed he was no longer dating the redhead or anyone else at the time. What had been a friendship marred by bad feelings had turned them into just barely more than acquaintances, but they were finally civil to each other. When Leonard came in, he found the two of them in Jimmy's study drinking a bottle of sherry and catching up on old times.

"Hostadter…" Siebert looked over to the young physicist. "You're the first to arrive!"

"I live here now."

"Oh, yeah…" Siebert and Jimmy exchanged glances. "I forgot that part."

"Jimmy, you staying?" Leonard looked up.

"I haven't decided…"

"Oh, come on," Siebert looked back to Jimmy. "Stay… we have so much to catch up on…"

"I think we've caught up on everything."

"If you'll excuse me…" Leonard looked once to Jimmy's Marilyn Monroe mannequin and back again. "I need to get cleaned and dressed for the party." He turned on his heel to head upstairs just as his boss asked Jimmy if he recalled a certain brunette actress that they both liked but neither got a chance to date. From there, Leonard's mind had drifted to Penny. He had invited her to the party as his guest, but she wasn't sure she could come. After getting rid of Sheldon, she still had to work the Twelve to Eight shift at the restaurant. If she could make it, she would come by. Meanwhile, the regular staff and professors were expected to arrive before 7:30 to meet and cajole the investors to continue their funding. Most of the potential investors were locals, but some of them traveled from as far away as Seattle, Sacramento and Dallas. One of them came from Boston, but despite the number of guests and colleagues, Leonard huddled in the corner of the grand dining room near the game room with Howard, Sheldon and Raj and shared their common awkwardness in the social setting.

"Aw, crap…" Howard commiserated. "It the same wrinkled old faces from last year. It looks like a prune factory in here." There was no one in the place close to his age to try to ask out.

"Why didn't you bring Bernadette?" Raj asked.

"She had a prior commitment." Howard confessed then looked to Leonard. "So, did Jimmy ever let you see his grandfather's work?"

"No…" Sheldon answered first. "And it's not fair. A scientific genius like myself begrudged the honor of another scientific genius's work…"

"Sheldon, give it up!"

"How can I?" Sheldon miffed. "Howard, do you think you can use your skills as a structural engineer to unlock one of these gates so I can get upstairs and check out the room?"

"Sheldon, give it a rest!" Leonard corralled Sheldon for the moment. "I got in the room…" He continued. "But Jimmy's sisters have used the room for storage. It's wall to wall boxes in there, and the first five boxes I looked in were full of romance novels, stuff from high school and cheerleader uniforms."

"Cheerleader uniforms?" Howard's attention was piqued. "Any photos?"

"What do you think?"

"He found photos." Raj was now interested. "Are they hot?"

Leonard just looked back at Raj, shook his head and walked away. He got another drink from the punch bowl, ate another piece of sushi from the table and headed toward the door to the kitchen. If he could get into the pantry, he could enter the front hall and get upstairs to retire for the night, but something caught his interest. Coming through the back doors to the pantry area, Penny arrived in a simple black dress and her long blonde tresses brushed out over her shoulders.

"You look incredible." He told her.

"Yeah…" She responded softly. "Things slowed down, and my manager let me go early." She stood at the bottom of the curving staircase up to Leonard's room where a metal gate closed off the upstairs hall. "So…" She acted distractedly. "Leonard, I was thinking…" She looked at him a bit flustered. "Um, about that thing we did yesterday…"

"Yeah…" Leonard back at her, but caterers were crossing before them from the kitchen to the refreshment table and guests were coming in and out from smoking cigarettes outside on the back patio. Penny seemed distracted.

"Leonard, is there somewhere we can talk?"

"Yeah…" He pressed forward into the kitchen where the breakfast table was covered with empty and partially empty champagne bottles and people used the kitchen to bake and prepare more food for the guests in the dining area. Leonard tugged Penny to the small alcove beyond the broom closet and next to the gate to the back stairs. He rolled the sliding door out to the small area to cancel out the noise in the kitchen then leaned back against the door to the pantry.

"Leonard, " Penny turned round to him. "I realized something today." She whispered. "I do have feelings for you. I didn't realize them until you moved out of the apartment. Maybe… I do love you and just didn't know it."

"Does this mean we're getting back together?" Leonard asked.

"Are you taking me back?" Her eyes looked into his just as pulled her close and pressed his lips to his. Leonard felt her heart pumping hard against his, her arms trying to pull him tighter. He kissed her with a slight tear running down his face and his mind racing a million miles a minute. He embraced Penny and caressed her face to realize they were back together.

"Penny…" He looked at her in the subdued light with the muffled sounds of the kitchen beyond them. "Move in with us."

"What?" She responded taken aback.

"We get alone so great together!" Leonard flashed back on the night before. "I know Jimmy likes you, and he's barely asking me for any rent at all! He just wants the company. You could save so much money!"

"Oh, Leonard…" Penny's mind was racing. "I don't know. I mean… it's just way too much to ask."

"Do you really want to be stuck driving Sheldon to work every morning?" Leonard responded. "Your trip to the Cheese Cake Factory from here would shave several minutes off your drive, and we'd be together!"

"Do you think Jimmy would go for it?"

"All I have to do is ask…." Leonard was getting excited just thinking about it. "All he could say is "No." but I don't think he'd say it. I mean, usually when someone has money, you'd think they would be obnoxious, but he's not."

"Do you think he'll let me move in?"

The intercom behind Leonard squawked on. "She can move in." Jimmy's voice sounded from it.

Leonard and Penny looked at it.

"Jimmy?"

"Next time you kiss…" Jimmy and Chuck were playing chess in the study. "Don't lean up on the intercom." He flicked the switch off and turned to analyze the chessboard. Siebert had more pieces on the board, but he just took another knight.

"I wonder how Cooper's going to get to the university now." Siebert smoked a cigar and knocked off a few ashes into the ashtray.

"Well…" Jimmy sat back as Chuck debated his next move. "That's his problem."

The following morning, Sheldon was up on schedule. Bathroom 8AM, Breakfast at 8:30, he was out of his apartment on time and knocking at Penny's door at nine o'clock expecting her to take drive him to work.

"Penny…" He knocked. "Penny…" He knocked. "Penny…" He knocked. After the last knock, the door unlocked and swung open. Howard's petite girlfriend, Bernadette, stood there.

"Hi, Sheldon, what's up?" She asked in her squeaky little voice.

"Hello, Bernadette…" Sheldon recognized her from the university as well from the Cheese Cake Factory where she worked off her student loans. "Is Penny ready to drive me to work?"

"She's not going to be living here, Sheldon." Bernadette continued. "She and Leonard got back together, and she's going to be staying with him at Jimmy's. Isn't that romantic?"

"I don't believe in romance." Sheldon answered. "Romance is just an archaic term to refer to the hormonal influxes in the brain regulating pheromone attraction between humans in the initiation of coitus." He paused temporarily. "Are you going to be living here?"

"For a while until the water in my building is repaired."

"Can you drive me to work?"

"Sorry, Sheldon, I still need to take a shower." Bernadette started pulling the door closed. "I guess you'll just have to take the bus. Excuse me…" She closed the door. Sheldon stood a few seconds more in the hallway. He looked around perplexed and unsure what to do next. His regular routine was getting disrupted by reality altering the world around him. First Leonard, then Penny… Everyone was leaving him. Who was next? Rajesh? Howard? Stuart at the Comic Book Store? What was causing this?

"Jimmy!" He started cursing the name like Captain Kirk swearing vengeance upon his enemy in _Star Trek 2 - The Wrath of Khan_.


	8. Chapter 8

8

Staying in Jimmy's sister room made Penny feel like a princess. There was the dresses in the closet, the huge bathtub, the scented bath pellets and the huge canopy bed with the comforter that hid her inside it. It was almost like staying as a guest in an expensive hotel except that it had a bit of a musty scent in there. Jimmy's weekly cleaning staff only turned the room down once a month with a fresh turn of the linens and a monthly vacuuming and dusting. Besides that, she was having a time finding signs of Sara's personality in the room, like the clippings of Eighties movie stars in the night stand, the diary about her exploits with a guy named Lionel and the vanity table with all the empty bottles of nail polish in the bottom drawer. This morning she helped herself to Sara's nail polish kit, dressed for work and said goodbye to Jimmy in the kitchen on her way to the Cheesecake Factory. Her car was parked outside the side entry under the extended roof. The driveway went around the house, beneath the back patio and around the house and past the basement garage under the trees outside Jimmy's study windows. Climbing into her Honda, she took her key from her purse and put it into the ignition to turn over the engine, but nothing was happening. She turned it once then a second time as if turning it once wasn't enough. Her eyes rolled out of fear. The little red engine light wasn't even coming on.

"Oh no…" Her voice commiserated as she checked her watch. She was due for the lunch shift at the restaurant. Swinging the door open, she grabbed her purse, hastened around her car and back into the side entry and through the foyer.

"Jimmy…" She found him in his study. "My car isn't starting. Can you drive me to work?" She stood in her yellow, white and blue restaurant uniform.

"What?" He acted like he hadn't heard her, but it actually just took him a minute to realize what she was asking. "When do you have to be there?"

"Twelve minutes…" She told him. Jimmy checked his watch and looked at something on his desk.

"Penny, I kind of waiting for an important call from the East Coast." He revealed. "Look, why don't you just borrow my car?"

"Your car?"

"I trust you."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure you're a good driver." Jimmy looked to her. "I trust you."

"What if I have an accident?"

"Are you planning on having an accident?" Jimmy just chuckled at her. "Just take it easy, the keys are on the hook."

"Okay…" She decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. She turned back to the kitchen about to leave, then whirled back again. "Why are you such a nice guy?"

"Penny, I've got five older sisters…" He typed something on his computer. "Let's just say I learned to take the least path of resistance a long time ago." Penny just turned around for the kitchen with a low inaudible "Wow" on her lips. She had never encountered anyone like Jimmy before. He was everything Sheldon was not. He was the Anti-Sheldon – a genius with a high I.Q. who did not lord his intelligence over others and treated everyone like equals. If she wasn't back with Leonard, she could have easily seen herself with him. She found his keys on his hook and took the stairs off the main hall into the garage into a wooden dungeon filled with the discards of another family. Old furniture, boxes of old toys, stored electronics and sealed boxes filled very cranny. A fifteen-foot long workbench covered in tools and car parts lined the wall under the landing. There were three garage doors. Car covers protected two cars from the dust of the rafters, but Jimmy's convertible red Volkswagen rested uncovered. At the bottom step, she pushed the button for the automatic garage door opener closest to her and opened the garage door. As it rattled and hummed pulling the garage open, Penny both hesitantly and eager moved to use Jimmy's car. She slid into the driver's seat, checked behind her and started the engine.

" – _Oops, I – Did it Again!_" Britney Spears screamed from the CD player. "_I played with your heart. I'm not that innocent_…"

"Wow," Penny turned it off to hear the purr of finely tuned German engineering under the hood. "I would not have guessed he was a Britney fan…" She slowly started backing out then noticed the garage door opener in the car and clicked it to close the garage without getting out of the car. Adjusting the radio to her radio station, she was soon cruising slowly up and out on to Ocean Grove Drive outside the gate, gradually driving a bit faster as she got used to this car and her long hair blowing in the wind. At that moment at Cal Tech, someone else found a reason to hate Jimmy. Dr. Sheldon Cooper had met the enemy, and his name was Dr. James Theodore Hoffman, a retired anthropologist with a trust fund and a big house. Over the last few days, Leonard was noticing Sheldon had stopped talking to him at the University. He had stopped eating with them in the cafeteria, and when they tried eating with him, Sheldon would get up and moved to another table. He also no longer joined them at the Cheesecake Factory or at the Comic Book Store. Leonard enjoyed the silence, but he couldn't understand why Sheldon wasn't returning his messages or e-mails. Was it possible that Sheldon was angry because of something?

"I don't get it." Leonard and Howard watched as Sheldon ate alone in the table against the wall of the university cafeteria. "It's been two weeks since I moved out. What could have done to tick him off?"

"Did you mispronounce "often?" Howard asked.

"No."

"Did you whistle near him?"

"I don't think so…"

"Did you say something about trains?"

"Course not…" They looked back at him. As weird as it sounded, Leonard was getting worried. Sheldon just looked at them, scowled and turned back to the wall like one of the plotting villains on the 1960s "Batman" TV Series. "Maybe he finally snapped and turned into a mad scientist."

"God help us all…" Howard mumbled out loud.

"Guys…" Raj came late to join them. "I got news…" He pulled out a seat and sat next to Leonard. "I talked to Kripke."

"How long did he stay with Sheldon before he moved out?" Howard asked.

"One day…" Raj reported. "That's the longest anyone has stayed yet with Sheldon so far, but get this…" He huddled closer. "Sheldon isn't mad at Leonard; he's mad at Jimmy."

"I thought he didn't have a problem with Jimmy." Leonard asked.

"Apparently Penny was the elephant breaking the camel's bank." Raj confused a popular American metaphor.

"Straw." Howard tried to correct him.

"What?"

"Straw that broke the camel's back."

"Dude, don't be ridiculous…" Raj scoffed at their translation. "Straw can't break anything. It's an elephant."

"He's mad at Jimmy because he thinks Jimmy was behind Penny and I moving out?" Leonard rolled his eyes in disbelief. "I can't believe this." He rose from his chair and went to confront Sheldon. "Sheldon? Sheldon?"

Sheldon continued eating his sandwich and acting as if Leonard didn't exist.

"Sheldon…" Leonard continued. "It wasn't Jimmy's idea for Penny to move out, it was mine. We got back together."

Sheldon didn't respond.

"I never stopped being your friend." Leonard tried to get through. "I just found a much better place to live. You can't be angry at me for something like that."

"Leonard…" Sheldon turned and faced him. "I warned you going to move in with Jimmy was a major mistake. I gave you all the best reasons in the world not to do it, and look, everything is all messed up and it's your fault!"

"Messed up?" Leonard was confused. "Nothing is messed up. I'm living in a great place, I'm barely paying any rent and I'm back with Penny. How is that all messed up?"

"I had to ride the bus to work for sixteen days."

"What?" Leonard reacted even more confused. "Well, I'm sorry you're slightly inconvenienced."

"Slightly inconvenienced?" Sheldon reacted. "No, General Custer was slightly inconvenienced at the Battle of Little Big Horn." He rose to throw away his trash in the receptacles as Howard and Raj watched the tirade. "Inspector Frederick Abberline was inconvenienced trying to capture Jack the Ripper. Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother were slightly inconvenienced after she took up axe throwing. I have been crippled because I have been forced to take the bus!"

"You mean your new roommate won't drive you anywhere?" Leonard tried to find a solution.

"Well, as ludicrous as it sounds, I have yet to find anyone to fill the void." Sheldon revealed.

"You haven't been able to get a single roommate in over four weeks?"

"Well…" Sheldon knew the figures. "There's been a hundred and sixty-seven applicants, but none of them have been able to pass the entry exam."

Leonard reacted from a mixture of distraught disbelief. That sore spot in his stomach from the ulcer he had living with Sheldon was back. From five feet away, Howard and Raj felt it too.

"Sheldon…" Leonard slowly reflected and thought. "I'm going to help you."

"You're going to drive me to work again?"

"That's a thirty-five minute round trip of driving!"

"Well, you've got to get up really early in the morning."

"I'm not getting up at 7:00 in the morning to make a forty-five minute drive through cross town traffic!" Leonard was almost screaming. "I meant I could help you find a roommate to drive you."

"Leonard…" Howard sidled over to them. "Anyone that crazy wouldn't be allowed to drive." He and Raj started laughing at Sheldon's expense.

"Why don't you ask Jimmy if Sheldon could move in?" Raj spoke up. "I'm sure he's got a dungeon or crawlspace Sheldon could hang upside down in." They started laughing again.

"No, Leonard…" Sheldon proudly struck down those ideas. "I couldn't possibly move into a house with a bathroom connected to the bedroom or a view with crazy giggling girls outside the window…."

"You have giggling girls next door?" Raj came to attention.

"Yeah, the Lovato sisters… " Leonard had seen them several times. "They're sweet girls."

"Damn…" Raj mumbled under breath. "I should have moved in with Jimmy when I had the chance."

"Just as I found a young innocent waif named Leonard Hofstadter off the street and dared to pull him up to great heights…" Sheldon continued.

"Pull him up?" Leonard was offended by the characterization.

"…So shall I again endeavor to find another worthy candidate to be my protégé…"

"Protégé?" Leonard was often amazed and offended by the size of Sheldon's ego and his ability to casually install insults in everything he announced.

"But I could not live under the roof of both my most hated enemy and the traitors who left me to side with him." Sheldon looked down on Leonard. "The guilty must be made to suffer."

"That's a shame…" Leonard surrendered and returned to his lunch. "And I was just about to invite you to go meet Adam West and Julie Newmar at the Hallmark showing of the original 1963 Batman movie."

Sheldon whirled around again after nearly returning for his office.

"Adam West and Julie Newmar?" Sheldon was in shock. Two of the stars of the TV series and the movie that started it? "But… but… how did you get tickets? They've been sold out for months!"

"Someone gave Jimmy tickets, and he gave them to Leonard…" Raj answered. "I bet Penny might like to go."

"No," Leonard sat down. "She has to work. Howard, how about Bernadette?"

"She's also got to work." Howard responded as Sheldon stood over them.

"Oh, gee…" Leonard decided to let Sheldon suffer on account of his own ego. "I'd hate to waste such an expensive ticket. I guess I'll just have to get someone else." He pulled out his phone. "I'll ask Kripke first."

"No…" Sheldon reacted out of terror. "Maybe I can create some form of ad hoc reprieve of your digressions that will allow me to go with you."

"I don't know…" Howard extended the punishment. "Leonard, just call Kripke and ask him if he wants the ticket."

"Okay…"

"Wait!" Sheldon hated being forced to show humility, but he was very good at faking sincerity. "You know, I can't begrudge you guys of not being able to tell others that we're friends. I might be able to go with you."

"Sheldon," Leonard looked at him. "Do you want to go?"

"Yes."

"Do you still consider me a traitor for moving out?"

"Course not…" Sheldon tried to scoff at the notion. "My war is with Jimmy, not you!" He tried grinning.

"Guys…" Leonard put it up to Howard and Rajesh.

"Oh, let's just let him come…." Raj answered.

"Yes!" Sheldon started relaxing excitedly. "Hey, maybe I can get a signed restraining order from Adam West to go with my signed restraining order from Leonard Nimoy."


	9. Chapter 9

9

Leaving from the Los Robles Apartment House after picking up Sheldon, Raj drove the guys to go get Leonard over on Ocean Grove. Sheldon was wearing his 1990s Batman shirt and was carrying his original Batman Annual Number One for Adam West to sign, Raj had smeared white paint over his face and green stuff in his hair to resemble the fictional Gotham City psychopath known as the Joker and Howard was dressed as Robin the Boy Wonder, Batman's eternal sidekick. They stopped at a light on their way to get Leonard, and Leslie Winkle from the university pulled up alongside them in her Honda Hatchback. She smirked at Raj in white face with the green-tinged hair, but when she saw Howard in the Robin mask and yellow cape, she cracked up laughing.

"What's she laughing at?" Sheldon wondered out loud as she pulled away.

"I don't know…" Raj looked around. "I don't see anything."

"Neither do I…" Howard looked around.

"How can you see anything from under that mask?" Raj asked and made the turn on to Ocean Grove. Jimmy's place was three up from the corner with the high brick perimeter wall. The gates were occasionally left open, but this time, they were closed. A brief buzz at the intercom outside the gate and Leonard opened the gate for them from the house.

"Come on in, I'm ready…" His voice came through the speaker. The guys drove on through down the twenty-foot tree-lined driveway toward the front veranda around the outside fountain. Sheldon glared at the house obstinately as if it was mocking him. In his mind, he pictured Jimmy standing in an upstairs window laughing and plotting against him. He checked the windows looking for him, his eyes crisscrossing from the first floor to the garret windows. His ego however large and fragile fueled his internal rage. He wished Leonard never met him. Raj stopped the car out front under the front entryway, and Howard undid his seatbelt, opened his car and got out of the car.

"What are you doing?" Sheldon looked to Raj then Howard in the back seat. "We can't go in. We have to stick to the schedule. We have only have fifteen minutes to get to the Hallmark otherwise we won't get good seats."

"It's common courtesy…" Howard answered.

"I don's see how being courteous makes it so common." Sheldon sat in the car a few seconds more, begrudgingly rolled his eyes then forced himself to undo his seatbelt and get out of the car. Setting his feet out on the property, his face made that annoyed sneer up to Jimmy's residence.

"At Hell's heart at stab at thee…" He made another Star Trek reference stolen from Herman Melville. Howard and Raj just rolled their eyes and continued on to the concrete steps up to the front door. Eight feet off the ground and covered on top by the extended roof off the second floor, they heard their steps scraping the concrete. There was a slight variation in the sounds of their shoes on the old original concrete and the recent repaired concrete. The newer concrete sounded crisper, the older parts duller and heavier. Raj hesitated to rub the sweat from his eyes. Howard buzzed for Leonard. The inside latches of the huge oak door were being pushed aside to open it.

"Hey, guys," Leonard started pulling open the door. "Pull around the side and pick me up… oh, no!" Leonard stood in his Robin the Boy Wonder costume before Howard's Robin the Boy Wonder. Wanting to have the large front door locked and bolted from the inside as he left out the side kitchen entrance suddenly became secondary as he and Howard looked at each other's costumes.

"Oh, come on…" He looked at Howard's costume. "We can't both go there dressed as Robin." The guys started mulling into the front entryway.

"Yes, you can." Sheldon spoke up. "There were multiple Robins in DC Comics. Howard can be the Dick Grayson version, and you can be the Jason Todd version."

"Why can't I be the Dick Grayson version?" Leonard reacted as he rebolted the door and slid the iron latch back into place. "I don't want to be the one who gets killed by the Joker."

"How about…" Raj knew the comics mythology as well. "Leonard goes as the Dick Grayson Robin of Earth-One and Howard goes as the Dick Grayson Robin of Earth-Two."

"Why can't I be the Dick Grayson Robin of Earth-One?" Howard didn't like that solution.

"People, listen up…" Sheldon raised his voice. "We have ten minutes to get there in line. If we are getting seats in the first three rows, we must leave now. I am not taking minutes out of our stop at the refreshments counter."

"We have an hour before the movie starts." Leonard looked up through his mask and glasses. "Look, I'll just run up and put on my suit from the fund-raiser." He had a plan. "I found a top hat in Jimmy's grandfather's upstairs lab. If I add a monocle and carry an umbrella, I can tell people I'm the Penguin."

"We don't have time." Sheldon insisted but Leonard just ignored him and raced down the long hallway for the back stairs with his yellow cape flapping. "We have ten minutes… This is coming out of your bathroom time, Leonard!" He turned around with a moan. "Oh, I know I should have added thirty minutes to the schedule for miscellany."

"Leonard," Raj looked up to Leonard heading up the front staircase. "This Joker makeup is burning my eyes. Where's the nearest bathroom."

"Jimmy has one in his study." Leonard pointed the way from the overhead balcony and hastened to his room. Exchanging a look with Howard, Raj looked over to where Leonard had pointed and turned to the right of the house. Flanked by trophy cases and covered by a decorative dark blue curtain tied back with gold rope, the archway opened into a room that was part museum and part library. The room looked like a copy of Bullfinch's Mythology had exploded. It wasn't so much decorated in any style inasmuch as it was filled both orderly and disorderly with artifacts and books on every shelf. The Marilyn Monroe mannequin was dressed as Aphrodite in front of the bathroom, the wood-paneled walls behind her were decorated with maps of the ancient world from various eras. One of them had Troy marked at the same time as Sumeria, Gaul and Dacia. The far corner had a sarcophagus in it with a fake mummy in it, but the most populated objects were the relics. African totems, Polynesian tikis, Russian dolls and Native American pukas. Raj walked through barely acknowledging the artifacts for the bathroom to get his makeup out of his eyes. Howard mulled past the statues both large and small looking them over in partial interest. Behind him, Sheldon strolled in out of boredom with a wry smirk to his face.

"Hey, Raj, look what I found…" Howard found a Hindu statue of the goddess Kali with eight arms, bare breasts, a garland of skulls, wild hair and long tongue. "Kind of makes you feel at home, huh?"

"No, my dad's got the real thing in his study in India." Raj had cleaned off the body paint that was burning his eyes. "Only, his is bigger and is made of solid silver."

"Really?" Howard noticed the sticker under the base. It was marked, "Ayodha, India, 1944 reproduction." He tried to remember where he had picked it up from to place it back then noticed a two-foot high phallic-shaped figure of the statue of Artemis the mother-goddess of Ephesus with multiple breasts

"Here's a girl I'd love to meet." Howard showed it to Raj. "Can you imagine trying to get her bra off? It'd take you all night."

Raj grinned and started snickering.

"How about this one?" Raj picked up a Syrian marble carving of a male warrior with extended genitalia. "You think he's got enough naked statues?" They were giggling like adolescent boys. Sheldon meanwhile stopped and sat down at Jimmy's desk under the bear head on the wall.

"I got an idea." Howard put the Syrian piece close to the Ephesian piece. "When we get back, maybe they'll be a bunch of baby statues all around them." They started cracking up with bales of laughter. Sheldon glanced momentarily over Jimmy's desk and started straightening it, dumping his loose pencils in their holder, picking up a book with work and notes in the pages and aligning his blotter with the edge of the desk.

"Tricca, Greece, 1985…" Howard lifted and read the stickers under the artifacts. "Uchte, Germany, 1897… Yoruba tribe, Dahomey, 1976…" He picked up a skinny figurine carved from a piece of wood.

"It's Polynesian Maori." Sheldon claimed sitting in Jimmy's seat.

"Jimmy has it tagged on the bottom."

"Well, he got it wrong." Sheldon was accessing Jimmy's desktop Compaq Presario computer on the desk.

"Should you be getting on Jimmy's computer?" Howard asked.

"Know thy enemy…" Sheldon commented. "A man with no security system on his computer has no secrets…" He chuckled derisively. "Oh, how simple the foolish can fall." His hand guided Jimmy's mouse to a file marked Recent. It was filled with pages marked by dates and chapter numbers.

"I don't think Jimmy's going to like this." Raj answered.

"Maybe he should have a password to keep others off of it." Sheldon looked down. "I wonder what that little timer is for?"

"What timer?" Howard asked coming around to look.

"That one…" Sheldon looked at the seconds counting down. "It started counting down from three minutes."

"Okay, guys…" Leonard came down the stairway and looked around the foyer. When he didn't see the guys, he looked toward the dining room then around to Jimmy's study where the guys were mulling en masse around Jimmy's desk. "Guys…" Leonard buttoned his vest and carried the top hat. I couldn't find my monocle or an umbrella so I guess I'll tell everyone I'm Alfred." He saw Sheldon at Jimmy's desk with the computer turned on before him.

"Sheldon, what are you doing?" His voice rose hysterically. "Jimmy doesn't want anyone on his computer! I don't even use it!"

"Oh, please…" Sheldon scoffed. "He'll never know I was on it." He paused. "I wonder what the timer is counting." It hit all zeroes and from over his head, he heard crunching sounds like giant gears and tumblers falling into place from somewhere in the mansion. It sounded like thunder or cannons firing on the house. A counterweight was heard coming down somewhere, and the sounds of over a hundred gears started turning. The guys stood around looking around the room for a Goonies trap or an Indiana Jones net to fall down on them. It sounded as if they were in a giant clock as several sounds went off around them. Howard cocked his ears to the noises as the sliding doors to Jimmy's study started rolling shut and two more gates came down to seal the room up around them. Gates sprang shut at both ends of the dining room and at both ends of the hall to the game room. A gate closed off the front ends of both the upstairs corridors, and a large steel plate covered up the front entrance. Around them, all the gates in the house started springing to life and closing up by themselves to seal all the doorways in the house. Steel-reinforced panels slid down over every window in the house. In the basement, the metal activity rattled dust from the rafters. The whole house was being sealed and locked up. Every door, every window was getting sheathed in an iron plate or blocked by steel bars. The entire house was becoming a large impenetrable vault.

"I think he's going to know!" Raj reacted stunned and scared. Howard rushed to the doors and found a spring-loaded trigger in the wall that released the doors to push them back, but the gate on the outside was made out of solid steel and held down by counterweights besides locked by something in the floor. It would require a master generator on the premises to pull everything up at the same time. He was both impressed and stunned by the architectural marvel.

"Good news!" Raj called. "At least, his study's private bathroom isn't closed off!"

"No- no- no- no- no- no…" Leonard ran to the doors of the study and tried rolling the gates back up the same way he had seen Jimmy do it the night of the fund-raiser, but they were locked in somewhere. They rattled, but they didn't move. They were trapped in the study with only the electric lights to keep them out of the dark.

"Leonard," Howard looked around. Steel plates on the windows, a locked gate at the doorway and more steel plates on every exterior entryway in the house, they had been locked up in a giant trap. "What the hell is this?"

"It's a security feature left behind when the place was a bank in the Twenties…" Leonard whined and rested his head in deep humiliated depression against the cold iron bars. "When I first asked Jimmy if I could use his computer, he said he had it wired into the gates and plates across the house to stop his sisters from changing his password and screen-saver, and I don't know his current password."

Howard and Raj turned and looked toward Sheldon with hostile intent.

"Don't blame me for this." Sheldon tried to deflect blame. "This is Jimmy's security trap – not mine!" He pompously changed his attitude. "Look, people usually use passwords of something they are familiar with that would be easy to remember, and he has left us dozens of clues around us." He grinned egotistically. I'll have us out in no time." He pulled up the login page in the computer and typed in a possible password. "Olympus…" He listened to the room. "Nothing… How about, Hercules?" He typed and looked up again. "Not it, Greece…" He tried again.

"Call Jimmy!" Howard begged Leonard. "He'll let us out!"

"Jupiter…" Sheldon typed again, but nothing happened. "Drat…"

"I can't…" Leonard commiserated the situation. "He's in Las Vegas for the weekend."

"King Arthur." Sheldon kept trying.

"Why?"

"They needed an expert to verify Native American remains under a restaurant out there." Leonard spoke slowly to keep from losing his temper. "He was recommended by a colleague."

"Atlantis." Sheldon refused to admit defeat.

"I thought you said he was out of anthropology." Raj spoke up.

"He decided to get back into it." Leonard held on disgustedly to the bars looking at the way out. Gates had even come down over the short hall to the front door. They must have come down all through the house. "He won't be back until Monday morning."

"Hobbit." Sheldon tried again. "Oh, wait, that's not factual." He paused. "I'll try it anyway… Oh, drat!" It didn't work.

"He sure picked a bad time to get back into it." Raj looked out through the bars. "We're going to miss meeting Adam West."

"Thanks for reminding me, Raj…" Leonard sighed.

"Cu Chulainn…" Sheldon tried Irish legend.

"Wait a second…" Realizing he was a structural engineer, Howard was peeking around the gate and up into the wall and thought he saw something that could help. He could swing the wooden doors open after clicking a restraining block out of the way, but the gates remained locked. "Guys, I need something long and thin enough to reach into the wall. If what I'm seeing is the mechanism to lift the gate, I can get us out."

"Here," Raj found a long metal shaft to the left of the door. "Will this work?"

"Perfect!"

"Eriskegal." Sheldon typed a Sumerian goddess.

"No!" Leonard stopped them. "Jimmy said that weapon was excavated from a Celtic grave in France. It's worth almost five thousand dollars!"

"It's solid iron, Leonard." Howard took it and tried to trigger the secondary release system. "There's no way it can be damaged any more than it already is." He lifted it by its end up through the wall and allowed it to swing backward against the box. It was a tiny amount of space to work in, but he thought he saw where the chain pulling the gate rolled around the gear. One eye closed, he grazed the side of it then prodded again. A sudden shock stunned his fingers and made him drop the bar on his foot. He screamed out in pain and hobbled backward in pain.

"I was wrong!" He lost his breath when his heart jumped a beat. "It's a junction box!" He held his shaking hands up.

"Well…" Sheldon watched as Howard stumbled backward on to Jimmy's leather sofa. "That's what happens when you prod an electrical box with a conductive object made of iron."

"Why didn't you warn me?"

"I just assumed you knew what you were doing."

"Sheldon, do me a favor?" Leonard looked back at him.

"I'm working as fast as I can, Leonard." He typed another possible password. "Tutankhamen…" Nothing happened. "Drat!"

"Stop coming over here!" Leonard requested very angrily.


	10. Chapter 10

10

After two hundred and twenty-three attempts to guess Jimmy's password, Sheldon gave up from trying to guess Jimmy's password, but to him, he hadn't given up anything. He was merely taking a break to reassess the situation. Reasoning that Jimmy possibly set the gates off a few times by accident, they then began searching the room for a release switch that lifted and opened all the gates from inside the room. They searched the shelves, the relics, the walls, the fake potted plant, the bear head, the radiator and even the adjacent bathroom fixtures. They even disrobed and redressed the Marilyn mannequin trying to find a switch on her person to undo the gates. Howard even copped a feel trying to see if they activated anything, but all he did was realize being dressed like Robin was not a good time to get sexually excited. Finally turning rational, they turned to Jimmy's Compaq Presario on the desk.

"Okay, guys," Howard sat at Jimmy's desk. "I've rebooted the computer, checked all his files and it seems Jimmy has a program that goes off whenever someone hacks his computer without the right password. It's connected to the gate system in the house."

"Can you reverse it?" Leonard asked.

"No…" Howard answered. "My guess is the computer is not connected to the release switch which is either outside the study or maybe even outside the house for the police to access."

"Do you think Sheldon contacted the police when he triggered it?" Raj answered.

"They would have been here by now." Leonard rationalized. "We've been in here over an hour."

"Leonard…" Sheldon came up to him. "What are you doing to help get us out of here?"

"I'm excising incredible mental control to not pummel you to death." Leonard glared at him.

"I don't see how violence is going to solve anything." He poked his head and arms against the bars in the doorway to the front hall. "_Nobody knows the trouble I've seen_…" He started singing a jail song in a deep baritone. "_Nobody knows my sorrow_…"

"You know…" Howard picked up an antique 18th Century Dutch crossbow Jimmy had near the front windows. "I bet I could do the world a favor and make it look like an accident." He aimed it at Sheldon with an evil grin then cocked his sound to the noise outside the house. Leonard and Raj ran to press their ears to the plate over the window. They heard Jimmy's car coming down the drive and go round the house to the side entryway. Raj heard it and got excited, but Leonard realized that Penny was still driving it. Unable to hear their screams for help, she sipped her soda from work, pulled in behind Leonard's car on the side of the face and flipped on the switch to pull the canvas roof over the car, waiting for it to finish closing before turning the engine off and getting out. Striding around the car to enter the side entryway, her hands reached to open the doors to the side portico and noticed the gates in the way. They had slid down to bar her entrance, but they hadn't closed all the way. There was a foot and a half clearance underneath where the gate had jammed from the weather warping the wood and buckling it into the house.

"Oh, I've got to hear this story." She descended to her hands and knees and shimmied her body underneath to get into the egress between the kitchen and the side hall. She then looked around and noticed the kitchen gate was down and locked. The pantry area was accessible, and it opened into the dining room. Dropping her purse on the dining table inside the room, she gasped and looked around the room. The wood doors had rolled together but had not locked to let her through them. Skirting between them, she made it into the foyer of the house, which now felt like a huge maze of passageways and dead ends. At the other side of the main hall, she saw the guys in their comic book costumes lined up like criminals behind the gate and trapped in the library study.

"Guys…" Penny came across the hall after them. "What the heck did you do? There are gates and shutters down all over the place!"

"How'd you get in?" Leonard called to her.

"The gate into the kitchen jammed halfway down." Penny stood in the foyer outside the gates on the study. "I just crawled under it." She looked at them trapped in the study. "What happened?"

"Sheldon set off a security program on Jimmy's computer." Howard told the truth.

"This is not my fault." Sheldon continued to try and deflect blame. "This entire system was created by Jimmy; how was I supposed to know it was tied into the security of his computer? I didn't even know it existed. I'm a victim here with the rest of you."

"What part of "Jimmy-does-not-want-anyone-on-his-computer" did you not understand?" Leonard stood at the gates and lowered his head against the steel gate. "Penny, could you please call Jimmy and ask him how to unseal the house?"

"Why me?"

"Maybe he won't be as angry if you ask him." Howard replied.

"I'll try…" She pulled her cell phone from her purse, casually looked to the guys and chuckled a bit.

"What's so funny?" Howard asked.

"You guys look like you're in jail." She smirked with a light giggle and pulled up Jimmy's number on her phone. The guys eagerly waited to be released. Somewhere in Las Vegas, Jimmy was in the Las Vegas Crime Lab examining Navaho remains recovered under the foundation of a demolished restaurant. CSI Tech Nick Stokes stood by him to observe his results. Asking to see the location where the skeleton was born, Nick started leading the way as the cell phone in Jimmy's pocket rang.

"City morgue, you stab 'em, we slab 'em…" He answered it. Even Nick shined a bit at the joke.

"Hey, Jimmy…" Penny sounded cheery and happy. "How's Las Vegas?"

"Great…" Jimmy looked to Nick waiting on him.

"Did you win anything gambling?"

"Not really, I haven't had the time…" He raised his finger to Nick to reveal it would only be a minute.

"Is it hot?"

"Does Leonard want to know how to undo my security?"

Penny hesitated in surprise.

"You know?" She looked back at the guys in deep embarrassment. Over-hearing Penny, Leonard was having another Sheldon-induced stressed-out mini-stroke.

"Penny," Jimmy followed Stokes to the SUV to check out the location the bones were found for more remains. "I've got five older sisters who were always in my business. My computer sends a message to my cell when the gates are set off."

"What happened?" Leonard asked with his face in the bars.

"His computer talks to his phone." Penny reported.

Leonard started stressing out from the humiliation.

"How do we get out of here?" Howard asked.

"Howard asked how can they get out?" Penny talked to Jimmy again. Through the phone, he paused as Penny took a deep breath.

"Go to the left trophy case in the foyer…"

"I'm at it."

"The silver medallion in the back; its popped out, right?"

"Yeah…" Penny knelt down and noticed that the medallion in the back was connected by a rod behind it through the back of the case; it had popped out an inch and had turned upside down.

"Turn it counter clockwise until you can read the names on it, and push it back into place." He told her. In his Pasadena home, Penny turned the emblem until she could read the name Ernst Stradivarius Brunner atop several other names in the silver plate then pushed in back into its mold. The trophy case had been his. It was attached to the house back when it was a speakeasy to deter the police. After Penny straightened it and popped it back into place, another system of counterweights in the walls of the house descended and gates began chiming all over the house getting pulled sideways and upwards once again. The numerous gears and pulleys started reacting once more. In the study, the wood doors sprang shut once more, and the gate went up into the wall. Sliding the wood doors apart, Leonard and the guys let themselves out of their confinement.

"Tell Leonard I'll talk to him when I get back." Jimmy added.

"Will do…"

"Thank God that's over…" Sheldon entered the freedom of the foyer. "Thanks to Jimmy, we are now thirty-five point eight minutes late for the movie."

"Thanks to Jimmy?" Leonard was livid. "Sheldon, you were the one that set off the gates after going on Jimmy's computer."

"But Jimmy is the one who installed the program that set off the gates."

"So you're completely not to blame here?"

"I accept your apology."

"That wasn't an apology!"

"Leonard, you're beating a crazy horse…" Howard got off his cell phone. "Stuart can still get us in if we're there in ten minutes." The guys looked at each other for all of half a second and bolted for the huge oak doors at the entryway. Penny watched as Leonard started shutting the door behind him then left it partially open to race to Raj's car to ride with him. Sheldon tried grabbing the front seat, but Howard jumped into it before he could. Leonard came around the car and jumped into the seat behind Raj in the driver's seat starting the car up and pulling down the driveway with Sheldon still outside the car and running alongside it as he rapped at the glass of the backseat trying to get Leonard to open the back door.

"Ye-ow…" Penny commented on their behavior as she watched the fracas then pushed the front doors completely closed, taking the time to push the bottom latch in and securing the inside bolt before locking it from the inside. Stepping back to catch her breath, she still had to do her laundry.

"For smart guys, they sure do dumb things…" She headed upstairs. "Now, where the heck is Jimmy's laundry room in this place?"


	11. Chapter 11

11

Parking his car behind Penny's under the extended roof on the side of the house, Leonard returned to the mansion that late Monday afternoon from the university and entered the side hall on his way for the foyer, not that going through the kitchen was any quicker a route to his room than the front way. It was a bright windy day and the breeze blew the leaves of tiny tree blossoms in to the side hall. He crossed the front hall heading toward the stairwell to head to his room. Perhaps, just unconsciously, he was willing to get over whatever yelling Jimmy was going to do to him. He started thinking how much he was going to miss living here.

"Leonard…" Jimmy was in his study. He noticed Leonard through the door and called to him.

Stopping on the bottom step of the staircase, Leonard looked up through the entryway and dropped his head down a bit lower. Crossing the width of the main hall like a small boy sent to the principal's office, he walked with his sneakers squeaking on the parquet floor. He treaded softer on the carpet of the study and blinked a few times before looking at Jimmy with ashamed embarrassment.

"You want to tell me what happened over the weekend." Jimmy leaned back in his leather chair with the fingers of his two hands up before him with the tips touching.

"Well…" Leonard choked on his words. As much he liked Jimmy as a friend and colleague, this was one of the hardest statements he had to make since he had moved into Jimmy's place. "I wasn't watching, and Sheldon got on your computer." He cleared his throat with a lot of difficulty. "I'm so sorry. You let me move into your house, you let me have full reign of the house, open your grandfather's research to me and let me move my girlfriend in, and then Sheldon violates your privacy. If you told me to get out, I would completely understand."

"And how long after throwing you out do you think I'd start to feet guilty?" Jimmy put his hands down and leaned sideways in his seat. "Leonard, I can't tell you what to do, but I seriously think you need to cut Sheldon out of your life. I can forgive, but one of these days, he's going to get you in a lot of trouble. You have to see that."

"I know…" Leonard felt a bit of pressure off. "I always thought that by living with him that I was teaching him to be more human, but… he's always fighting the effort."

"Why have you stayed with him this long?"

"Well," Leonard tried to understand it. "After a while, you kind of start wondering where he's going and you want to see it through…" He added. "But then you can kind of get complacent, and he'll come at you with something you don't expect."

"I don't have a problem with Howard and Raj…." Jimmy sat back again and tapped the mouse of his desktop computer. "They're great guys and obviously good friends, when they're not having fun humiliating each other, but I don't want Sheldon in my house ever again, and if he's got a problem with that, send him to me. I'll knock that ego of his down to size."

"It's not his ego you have to worry about…" Leonard looked to the Hindu fertility statue on the desk and back to Jimmy. "It's his mouth." He paused a moment. "Is there any chicken left?" He started getting hungry.

"One more thing, Leonard…" Jimmy tapped his Hotmail open and pulled open his e-mail account. "I got an e-mail from my sister, Sara. She and Gwen are bringing the kids for the summer here in sunny California."

"It'd be nice to meet them."

"Yeah…" Jimmy pulled the regular rooming agreement. "Unfortunately, Sara and her husband will want her room back, and Penny will have to go in yours. Some of my nephews and nieces are still under thirteen, so you guys will have to curb the fooling around here. Do you mind sleeping in my grandfather's study?"

"I guess so…" Leonard thought about it. "I've been moving things around in there so I can make it nice."

"You find anything earth-shattering in his notes." Jimmy now stood to take some textbooks back to his shelf.

"He was on the same lines of a lot other guys in terms of infra-spatial lines of forces along permutable fields of resistance…" Leonard turned physicist again. "But I'm having a hard time trying to follow his logic that string theory can double back upon itself in areas of higher inertial force within sub-atomic fields."

Jimmy pulled his hand over his head as a gesture to show that the physics jargon went over his head.

"I'm glad you're getting a kick out of it." Jimmy placed his books back, noticed Marilyn was slightly askew and dragged her back into her spot near his downstairs bathroom. "Don't forget to give Penny the message about my sisters coming."

"I won't…" Leonard turned to head out then paused and looked back at Jimmy adjusting the arrangement of his books. "Thanks again for the second chance."

"You deserve it." Jimmy turned around as Leonard headed for the kitchen. "Just don't squander it…" He mumbled under his breath then looked at Marilyn again and found a spot on her shoulder. "Did someone try giving you a hickey?"


	12. Chapter 12

12

As Leonard struggled with how to tell Sheldon he was not allowed back at Jimmy's place, he found he really didn't have to mention it. Sheldon's hatred of Jimmy already made him leery and reticent to even wanting to step on the grounds much less enter the premises. Leonard was also making a lot of time with Penny. They were together almost every night either watching TV in the game room or going to the movies. Looking forward to this night off, Penny kept looking forward to it as she served patrons who dined at the Cheesecake Factory.

"Here's your Baked Tilapia…" She was serving Michael Bluth, former manager from Bluth Realty, and his date, Dr. Stephanie Barnett, an attractive and shapely red-haired physician from the local hospital. "And here's your Chef Salad." Penny recalled Stephanie as a former girlfriend of Leonard's.

"Thank you…" Stephanie looked up. "Penny, could I get more Diet Pepsi?"

"Sure…"

"Excuse me…" Michael eyed his sandwich. "Could I get more tartar sauce on the side?"

"Of course…"

"Michael, glad I found you…" Someone briefly blocked Penny at the head of the booth and stood before it. "You sure made it hard to find you."

"I didn't want to be found." Michael looked up to his brother Gob and was irked to see him taking some of his French Fries. "Stephanie, you know my brother."

"Yes, I recall Gob."

"Michael, you're still dating the fat girl?" Gob was hardly skilled when it came to being discreet. Stephanie dropped her jaw a bit offended. She had briefly dated Gob until he broke up with her to try re-joining the Magician's Alliance, but Michael felt a bit of a bond with her and had started dating her. Chuckling under breath, Gob looked down to his brother. "Look, Mikey, I need some money to buy a new illusion."

"Gob, I'm not giving you, Lindsay, Buster or our mother any more money." Michael lightly shook his head. "I tried helping by keeping the company afloat for three years. I told you guys not to sell your shares. I'm not helping you clean up after your own mistakes."

"But you're my brother…" Gob played the brother card. "Or… I knew it! You're a robot!"

Stephanie just sat and watched this umpteen Bluth brother spectacle play out in public before her.

"I'm not giving you more money to waste on another trick, Gob…"

"Illusions, Michael!" Gob insisted. "Illusions!" His spring-loaded arm trigger launched a spray of a dollar's worth of pennies across the table. Coins landed in the drinks, Michael's French fries, Stephanie's salad, her cleavage and everywhere else. Penny came with the tartar sauce and extra drinks just in time to see the spray of money covering the table along with coins falling down and rolling across the floor.

"That was supposed to be a flame." Gob checked his device.

"Holy crap on a cracker…" Penny moved in to help. "Sir, would you like new French Fries. A new salad, Stephanie?"

"It's not that bad, Penny, thanks…" Stephanie started pulling pennies from her salad.

"I suppose somewhere in all this my brother left the tip." Michael joked. Gob stepped back briefly then noticed Penny. He eyed her long blonde hair, her lovely bone structure then lowered his gaze down to her bosom.

"See a penny, pick her up, and all the day you'll have good luck…" He grinned to her. "Hi, I'm Gob Bluth, Michael's brother, the good-looking one. Free tonight?"

"I've got a boyfriend." Penny turned after taking the old sodas from the table with pennies in them. For the moment since encountering her again, Penny was embarrassed for Stephanie. They might not have been friends during the time she had dated Leonard, but they didn't harbor any bad feelings for her. Turning in the old drinks at the dishwasher's counter, she shared a look toward her fellow employees, Bernadette and Chloe, then hastened to help another customer in her section of the restaurant.

What was wrong with this picture?

It was the guy in the booth behind Michael and Stephanie. Sitting alone, he had another small figure next to him that Penny at first thought was his kid, but this figure looked like a cross between a Muppet and a cartoon character. It had purple skin and a tuft of neon green hair made of yarn at the slender top of a turnip-shaped head just breaking over the surface of the table as it looked at the menu on the table with its human companion.

"Oh God…." Penny paused reluctantly then did her job. "Hello, welcome to the Cheesecake Factory, would you like to hear our specials?"

"I'd like the Subway Club."

"No, he doesn't." The little guy said. "He wants the seafood sandwich."

Penny stood and watched this scene with curious surprise.

"No, I'd like the Subway Club."

"No, he wants the seafood sandwich." The little guy insisted.

"No, I don't."

"Yes, he does…" The woozle stood in the seat to his look his best friend in the face with unblinking painted eyes on neoprene foam. "Search your feelings, Jeff-Fuh-Fuh…" Jeff stared back at his little friend with restrained amusement. It was at that moment that Penny noticed her patrons arm extended up the back and into the head of the puppet. The restaurant was not far from the Emerald Night Club in Pasadena. Comedians, ventriloquists and magicians were always slipping in the Cheesecake Factory for lunch or dinner.

"I get it!" Penny started grinning. "You're a ventriloquist! You're really good!"

"Thanks…" Jeff sipped his water with his free hand. "This is my buddy, Peanut."

"Do you have a boyfriend?" Peanut looked at Penny.

"Yes, I do." Penny was smiling ear to ear. Stephanie in the next booth was watching excitedly with Michael. Rushing out of the restaurant, Gob had rushed to his girlfriend's house to get his puppet Franklin.

"Are you sure?" Peanut postured human-like. "Once you go purple, you never go back!"

Penny started laughing to have a dummy hitting on her.

"I'll take the Seafood now and a Subway to go." Jeff gave Penny his order. "Pepsi to drink please." Penny wrote down his sandwich order.

"Are there any jalapenos in that club?" Peanut asked.

"No, would you like some."

"No, they might be someone we know." Peanut did a little tip of the head as Jeff drank his water grinning at the joke. It was a reference to a character named Jose in their act who was a giant talking jalapeno on a stick. Penny started laughing again and headed to turn in the order at the kitchen. In the next booth, Stephanie was watching and giggling as Peanut was standing in the seat next to Jeff and swaying his head back and forth, his hips making a sort of dance for the restaurant patrons. It would be good publicity to sell out his show at the nightclub. At that moment, Leonard and Howard entered the restaurant for lunch without Raj and Sheldon. They looked around once and noticed an empty booth in Chloe's section, but then a couple left a table in Penny's section and they moved to take that one. The table was mostly clear except for two cups of coffee and a tip.

"What are you going to tell Sheldon when he gets here?" Howard spoke out loud. Raj had lost the short straw to take the long way to lunch in order to give them time to talk.

"I don't know…" Leonard was conflicted. "I mean… Sheldon's still my friend. Do you think it will matter to him if he can't come to Jimmy's house anymore?"

"But you said Jimmy told you it might be best to not to hang with Sheldon anymore."

"I know what he said, but…" Leonard was reluctant to completely cut Sheldon out of his life. "Look, Jimmy makes a good point. Eventually, Sheldon's going to insult or make a stupid comment to the wrong person who won't ignore him, and I'm going to get hit with the fallout. How do I tell a guy who's my best friend that I can't be a part of his life anymore? He kept me from getting arrested by Homeland Security."

"Five years ago!" Howard was there when the rocket propulsion experiment blew up the elevator shaft in their building. "As far as I can tell, that debt is paid! Cut him loose!"

"I can't…"

"Do you remember the great sinus infection of '08?" Howard made a good argument. "He made you watch him all night in case he slipped into a coma! What about when he made you scour the kitchen clean with a toothbrush when Raj's mouse got loose for seven seconds? How about when he sent you all the way to Santa Barbara to exchange a Star Wars PEZ dispenser? How about when…"

"You want a room at Jimmy's, don't you?" Leonard's eyes narrowed suspecting a motive.

"Three hot teenage girls next door and five hot older sisters? Come on!" Howard jumped across the table to beg. "I've got to get out of my mother's house!" Penny had come by to get her tip and clear the table.

"Hi, guys…" She wiped the table with a new cloth. "Sorry, but we're a bit slammed. Where are Raj and the geek nobody wanted?" She was still in the good mood from meeting the ventriloquist.

"They'll be along in a few minutes." Leonard responded.

"Did you tell Sheldon he can't come by Jimmy's anymore?" Penny knew about the talk.

"I'm working on it."

"What's to work on?" Howard didn't see a problem. "Sheldon, you're out. Phfft…" He made it simple.

"If Jimmy's sisters come home, Howard, there won't be an empty room in the house." Penny pointed out.

"I will live in the attic!"

"Is there room for me in that attic?" Peanut was eavesdropping.


	13. Chapter 13

13

On Ocean Grove, Pasadena locals Russell Galecki and Johnathan Lovato jogged to keep in shape, but as they passed Maplecroft, the mansion that Abraham Reinhoff had left to his grandchildren, they casually looked up and were struck by the shapely form in the upstairs bedroom window. A scantily clad figure danced and moved across the light of the upstairs front bedroom window on the front of the house. When Leonard made plans for a nice dinner at Diego's, one of Pasadena's most top rated Italian places, Penny wanted to do it up right, and when her dresses didn't make her standards, she tried the ones left behind by Jimmy's sister already in the closet. There were quite a few of them. Short party dresses, long evening dresses, some backless, some off the shoulder and some very regal with French tags and sophisticated clasps. She wanted to try them all on.

"That's weird…" Penny was trying on Sara's blue spaghetti strap ensemble. "The tag says it's a size twelve, but it doesn't feel like a size twelve." She checked her reflection in the mirror.

"That's because it's a size eleven." A voice said.

Penny's head turned to look behind her. Standing and leaning on the doorway, Sara Kathryn Hoffman had opened the doorway ready to bring her suitcase in and stood watching Penny modeling in the mirror. She was of slighter build than Penny with big brown eyes and short blonde hair cut short at the shoulders. Wearing a sleeveless black top and blue jeans, she blinked once then twice with an amused grin.

"Penny, right?" She knew about Jimmy's tenants through his e-mail and entered the room. "You see, my older sisters are about your size, but I couldn't stop them from stealing my clothes either, so I changed all the tags in them to confuse them. I'm Sara by the way."

"Nice to meet you." Penny turned and came round the bed to meet her. "I'm sorry, it's just that I got a date with Leonard tonight, and I'm…" She shined a little trying to be charming.

"Well," Sara advanced on her closet. "If you really want to knock him out…" She pushed the clothes left and right to part them down the middle, reached through to the back and slid the back panel of the closet open to step through it. Watching her disappear into it, Penny confusingly followed her. She stepped under the closet rung, brushed through a curtain behind the wall and entered a cold hidden room lined with clothes on hangers all around it and on a large dress rack in the center of the room. Her jaw dropped in shocked awe at this secret. It was her deepest desire to find a secret stash of expensive dresses, shoes and accessories, and this was exactly how she pictured it. Sara casually picked through the center rack and pulled out a black dress.

"Alicia got this in Paris." Sara draped it before Penny before the mirror. "Put your hair up and you'll kill him in it!"

"I love you so much!" Penny's voice screeched out of delirious joy. Sara chuckled at her as if they were old friends. At that time, kids screamed through the house in much the same way the Marines stormed Iwo Jima. Three boys chasing one girl tore through the house for the game room. From atop the front balcony overhead, Jimmy and Leonard watched over them running through the premises.

"They're here…" Jimmy sounded like a creepy little girl. Leonard looked over to him.

"Remember…" Jimmy next sounded like crocodile expert Steve Irwin. "Don't show any weakness at them! They will take you down and rip you apart!" He looked at Leonard. He was used to his eccentric use of impressions, but then Jimmy looked down again and waved to Sara's husband, Fred, carrying in suitcases. Gwen's husband, Peter, was carrying two boxes of meat from his meat-packing plant for a summer of barbecues. Behind him, Gwendolyn Stephanie Hoffman finally entered just as beautiful as Sara with white alabaster skin, two powerful brown eyes and much longer and blonder hair. She was taller than Penny, but not as physically endowed. She yelled ahead at the kids then looked up and waved at Jimmy with a big beaming grin as the loving sister. Out back, the kids already wanted to jump in the pool, but the water was too cold this late in the day. They'd have to wait until tomorrow afternoon.

"Jimmy…" Leonard was awestruck. "Your sisters are hot."

"Tell me about it…" Jimmy flashed back on endless guys who once haunted the property. "If I had a nickel for every jerk who told me to go play in traffic so they could deflower them…"

"Wait till Howard meets them…" Leonard's only thought now was about moving into the lab while they were here. There might have been sixteen bedrooms in the house, but three of them belonged to other sisters, one of whom was expected in another week, one was the master bedroom of their parents and another five would belong to the tribe of up-coming adolescents. Leonard had the guest room over the kitchen. The three remaining rooms had broken down beds, old furniture and relics and belongings from past tenants, including the ledgers and chairs from when members of the National Socialist Party who used the house as a meeting hall in the Thirties. When he returned that night after his date with Penny, he was in an amorous mood, but Penny reminded him of his promise with Jimmy, and he was sent to retire in the upstairs study. It wasn't all that bad. It was a large double room with the remains of the wall that had once separated the two in partial existence, reduced to an archway ten feet wide between two joined rooms of boxed files, filed hand-written research and the loose boxes of journals and correspondence with other physicists of the time. The boxes on the shelves stacked to six feet high while the boxes on the tables stacked to the ceiling. Interspersed between the boxes were the remnants often set aside by family members such as a set of old skis, a long brass floor lamp, an old Beta recorder, an old TV and even a forgotten period jukebox filled with the music of the Late Seventies. At the end of the room under the window where Leonard had began the clearing process, he slept in the window seat after listening to the dying noises of Jimmy's nieces running through the halls, the nephews playing mock battles in the halls and then the distant screams of Gwen's baby girl, Samantha, who despite weighing only eight and a half pounds made the sounds of a forty-ton fire engine bawling through the halls. Jimmy was enjoying the company, but only for a couple of hours before he secretly told Leonard that August could not come fast enough. With the night came peace and quiet, and Leonard accepted it happily as his mind drifted off to meet Penny in the dreamscape on a deserted isle. A grin on his face, he was briefly roused from his sleep and woke to the shadows of the room. Darkness fractured by boxes and family relics met his eyes as he looked up through his blurry vision then rested his head to his pillow again to meet Penny in that seashell bra back on the island paradise. A brief scowl and he tried to escape the world once more. As his senses centered on the silence, his mind started detecting all nature of sounds. The house creaking, a distant light switch flicking on in the bedroom beyond the wall, the sound of a light gasp from the house air conditioner kicking on, a rapping noise at his door…

Reaching for his glasses, he swung his legs to the floor and stood as the rapping noise occurred once again.

"I'm coming…" He sleepily called out. He wondered if Penny was inviting him to stay with her. Treading the carpet, Leonard unlocked the door and swung one side of the entryway open.

There was no one there.

Confusingly and sleepily looking up and down the hall, he made a few steps to peek down the back stairway, but it was empty as well, a few photos on the walls the only thing to greet the wakened physicist. He turned back around for his room as Penny opened her door yawning.

"Yeah," She was still half asleep. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing… Go back to sleep." Leonard whispered to her.

"Why'd you knock on my door then?"

"I didn't knock on your door." Leonard mentioned. "You heard someone knock at my door."

"Oh…" She looked haggard and tired in her nightshirt. "Who was it?"

"No one… I missed them." Leonard apologized. "Go back to sleep." He looked around again. Penny looked at him with one eye and closed her door to return to bed. Returning to bed once more himself, Leonard closed and relocked the study and moved back to the window seat. It wasn't bad for sleeping on, but he had to bend his legs because it wasn't as wide as he was short. Laying his glasses aside and setting his head down, Leonard was ready to turn back for the island, but then he heard the rapping noise again. He sprang from his bed this time a bit annoyed. Grumbling under his breath, he felt as if he was living once more with Sheldon. He unlocked the door and swung it open.

"What?" He opened the door to nothing. There was nothing outside his room, but floating down the hall he thought he saw a female form shaped from incandescent light. It wasn't Penny, Gwen or Sara. This girl had long waist length blonde hair and was glowing as if she had a system of lights under her nightgown. She was gliding away further and further back for the front of the house. More confused than scared, Leonard walked slowly behind her in his t-shirt and underwear. Her form wasn't distinct. She was more like a hologram out of focus, but even his blurry vision could see her hair and the outline of her arms. As he came around to see her face, she seemed to fade away into nothingness, and Leonard found himself in the pitch-black hallway over the front foyer.

"What the heck was that?" He asked himself.


	14. Chapter 14

14

When he woke in the morning, Penny allowed Leonard to use his bathroom and he joined her downstairs for breakfast afterward. Out of school, Jimmy's nephews and nieces in the house were eager to see movie stars or revisit their old vacation spots. Gwen and her husband, Peter, discussed taking the kids on a drive to the zoo, then she and Sara talked about their plans to take everyone to the beach. Penny sat eating pancakes at the table Sara had made as two of Jimmy's nephews grinned to her with their adolescent toothless grins. They seemed to have crushes on her.

"Leonard, pancakes?" Sara offered him a plate.

"Thanks," He looked around. "Where's Jimmy?"

"He went to the store for me." Gwen was trying to deal with her six-year-old daughter, Angelique, tugging at her shirt as she tried feeding her one-year old daughter Samantha in a high chair. "He'll be back in a few minutes."

"Oh," Leonard sat at the table and moved a baby bag to get some syrup. "Well…" He paused and looked to Sara's boys grinning and mooning over Penny from their breakfast. "I just had a weird experience last night, that's all…"

"You too?" Penny looked up as Sara took her boys' empty plates and sent them to play in the game room. "I also had a weird experience." She continued. "I could have sworn there was a lady on Leonard's balcony."

"You saw her too." Leonard ate his pancakes as Gwen set the last of the sausage in a plate down for him. "I saw her in the hall."

"Oh, her…." Sara and Gwen looked at each other. "That was probably just the ghost."

"What?" Penny was first to react.

"Didn't Jimmy tell you the history of this house?" Gwen spoke first. "During Prohibition, a guy named Brunner ran the house as a speakeasy and bordello. He had several ladies of the night here." She paused to feed her baby girl. "One of them was the mistress of a local judge who was married, and when he refused to divorce his wife to marry her, she threatened to expose the affair."

"Long story short…" Sara sat down to eat her breakfast. "She vanished under very mysterious circumstances. Allegedly, Brunner and the judge had conspired to do her in, but no one could prove anything. Anyway, her ghost is said to wander the property screaming for justice."

"Is this true?" Leonard only ate three pieces of the link sausages.

"We saw her several times as kids going down that back stairway and wandering the grounds." Gwen took her daughter to burp her. "Why do you think Jimmy is the only one among us still living here? He's not bothered by her!"

"But there's no such thing as ghosts." Leonard commented.

"Ever hear of a writer named Walter Birschott?" Sara looked up. "He was a friend of our dad. One night he woke us up screaming and yelling before he ran out in to the middle of the night. He never stayed here again." She looked to Penny. "Family rumor has it that the ghost climbed in bed with him." She lifted a forkful of pancakes to her lips.

"That's my room." Leonard looked at Penny.

"That's where I'm sleeping." Penny looked at Leonard.

Leonard and Penny looked at each other from across the table. He was going to drive her to work, but now, they had a side trip to make that took them back to Los Robles Avenue. At their old apartment building, Sheldon was ready to leave promptly at 8:45 and ran into Leonard.

"Leonard, you're here?"

"I found you a roommate."

"Who?"

"Me." He walked in carrying his overnight bag and a suitcase. He looked back to Penny entering her old apartment. She had her suitcase and her travel kit. They were moving back in the building.

"I don't understand." Sheldon paused and watched as Penny entered her old apartment with Bernadette still in it and Leonard entered to drop off his bags. "What happened?" Sheldon asked. "Did Jimmy throw you out?"

"No…" Leonard scoffed at that idea. "It just got a bit crowded."

"But he's got sixteen bedrooms in his house."

"Yeah…" Leonard sounded as if it wasn't enough.

"Why did you move out?"

"It got crowded."

"With sixteen bedrooms?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I don't care." Sheldon was grinning ear-to-ear. "I'm so happy, I won't even make you sign a new roommate agreement. I saved the old one knowing you'd return to your sanity."

"Yippee…" Leonard sarcastically responded very much depressed.

"Well, we better get going." Sheldon animatedly waited on Leonard. "You're driving me to work!" He raced out to take his usual spot in Leonard's car. Leonard just sighed and dropped his head. He had exchanged cutting Sheldon out of his life for moving back into the apartment with him.

"Ghost…" He tried to weigh the two using his hands. "Sheldon… Ghost… Sheldon…" He paused stuck in the tie. "Maybe I can reason with the ghost…"

Back on Ocean Grove, Jimmy sat in his study and pretended to work at his computer. He had not made it back in time to talk Leonard out of moving out of the house. He was halfway through the side hallway and was dropping off the groceries when Sara appeared in her top and shorts ready to go out and announced the Leonard had departed and Penny had gone with him. The short quirky scientist was the closest thing to a brother he had ever had. He liked his company and the camaraderie, and toward the end, he was even starting to like having Penny in the house. He was depressed and deflated. Unable to work on his recent fiction, he photo-shopped blue eyes on to Britney Spears and moved the head of Demi Lovato from her photo to the body of Christina Aguilera in another, but even that couldn't pick up his spirits. Midway through an image of a fifty-foot tall Selena Gomez attacking Chicago, he sighed, erased his effort and turned off his photo-shop software. He wondered why Leonard couldn't have waited to tell him he was moving out of the house. His self-esteem falling lower and his life in this house dulled by loneliness, he supported his sullen face in his hands on the top of his desk. Looking up, he saw his nephew Carter standing in the front hall outside his study. The bare-chested bare-footed miscreant was on his way to the swimming pool.

"Uncle Jimmy…" The boy looked up with a mischievous face. "Are you a doo-doo head?"

"What?"

"Mommy said you were!"

Jimmy's finger hit a button on his computer and the gears and weights in the house sounded off around him, slamming his wood sliding doors shut a few feet from the boy and dropping the gate, sealing up his office against the reality that was his sisters. He dropped his head into his arms in front of him. He was like that for a few minutes until the intercom buzzed. It was either Gwen or Sara wondering if he was all right. Barely looking up, his finger hit the switch.

"Yes…." He sighed defeatedly. It was the front door.

"Hi, this is Alan Harper… Uhhh, Charlie's brother. Uh, is that room still available?"

END


End file.
